![]() Louis” and “Peel Me a Grape,” and that reconsideration set the album’s tone. She turned the ballad winning and coy, placing it alongside wisecracking female standards like “You Came a Long Way from St. West was in her mid-thirties when she recorded “Temptation,” and took her title from the notoriously ponderous machista torch song made famous by Bing Crosby, Billy Eckstine, and the University of Michigan marching band. It can be hard to remember in these TikTok times that the power of recording is to let work live not just in its moment but across the years: to help preserve what’s good enough to last. “Temptation” turns twenty-five this year, and what strikes me at the milestone isn’t just my conviction that the album remains as dazzling as ever but the realization that, in twenty-five years, I have never once stopped listening to it, never taken it from frequent rotation. ![]() Her style, precise and wistful, let in breezes from a mature world. ![]() ![]() I was barely thirteen, but the confidence with which West sang buoyed my own. I first heard the jazz singer Paula West’s début album, “Temptation,” not long after it came out, in 1997, and it gave me the conviction that adulthood might be an interesting place to live. ![]()
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