"Make Me Smile" by Chicago (1970)

Dance song of the day - August 9, 2024

This has been a week of uplifting songs to counter what’s going on in the world and, I must confess, to cheer me up given the awful weather we’ve been having here in my neck of the woods.

Today we have a song that never fails to put me in good spirits. Hopefully, if you need it, t’will do the same for you.

Song of the day

One of the first bands I loved unreservedly was Chicago. I’m talking early Chicago, meaning their debut album Chicago Transit Authority (1969), where they hit a homerun the first time at bat with “Questions 67 and 68”, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?”, “Beginnings”, and “I’m a Man”.

I’m also talking their second album Chicago (1970) with “25 or 6 to 4”, “Make Me Smile”, and what I have claimed in a previous post to be the best slow dance ever, “Colour My World”.

Don’t get me wrong, there are great Chicago songs after these two albums. That is indisputable. But if their catalog had stopped after their second album, I would still consider them up there in the pantheon of my favorite bands.

Heck, if the group had done just one of their best songs, such as “25 or 6 to 4” or “Saturday in the Park,” they would still be remembered and revered for it.

That’s how good the original Chicago lineup was, in my view.

Their songs were complex and their sound unique. And most importantly, they make you feel something. Not something silly or fleeting, but something profound.

For me, they make life feel significant and imbue it with a sense of urgency. Do something! Go live life, and live it big.

“Make Me Smile” is one of the songs that sent me into spasms of delirium and purpose as a teenage girl, and continues to do so today. Whenever I hear this song, I am overwhelmed with a desire to fall in love, to feel hopelessly and wrecklessly in love.

Don’t take it from me that this is a great song musically either. Rick Beato makes the case in this video.

But first-hand experience is the ultimate test. First, listen to them performing the song live, with Terry Kath delivering a stunning guitar solo. You might have to turn up the volume a bit on this clip.

But your experience would not be complete without listening to the studio singles version too — “double your pleasure, double your fun” as Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum commercials used to tell us. It’s the distilled and perfected Chicago experience for the radio listener.

Didn’t that lift your spirits and make you want to fall hopelessly and wrecklessly in love? Or, at the very least, do something thrilling and extraordinary?

Song credits

Songwriter - James Pankow

Chicago:

• Peter Cetera – bass, backup vocal

• Terry Kath – guitars, lead vocal

• Robert Lamm – keyboards, backup vocal

• Lee Loughnane – trumpet, backup vocal

• James Pankow – trombone

• Walter Parazaider – saxophone, flute, clarinet, backup vocal

• Danny Seraphine – drums, percussion

Production:

• James William Guercio – producer

• Donald Puluse – engineer

• Brian Ross-Myring – engineer

• Chris Hinshaw – engineer