One person’s view: “You could wring every ounce of possible comedy from every birdbrained novelty single of the entire 1960s combined and it still wouldn’t be half as genuinely, laugh-out-loud hysterical as the moment Holman’s squeaky, mickey-mouse falsetto comes in on ‘Hey There, Lonely Girl’.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year
The public’s view: 2.78 / 5.00
If there is any type of music that is not made for me, it’s slow-tempo ballads consisting of men trying to convince women to go out with them. The unabridged speeches of Walter Mondale are more exciting than the wimpy begging and listless crooning in these lullabies. Asking me which song of this genre that I want to hear is like asking which of my fingers I wish to slam in a car door, or which pew I would like to sit in at church. And yet, Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl” doesn’t rankle me in the same way as its brethren. It is so bizarre that I forget how much I should hate it.
Until researching this post, I had always assumed that Eddie Holman was the same guy who was in the Stylistics and that “Hey There Lonely Girl” was a rare solo hit. Nope. The Stylistics’ falsetto was performed by a different person named Russell Thompkins Jr. This means that, in defiance of the laws of probability and of nature itself, there were two men singing in this manner on hit pop/R&B songs in the early 1970s. The Stylistics wisely paired Thompkins up with conventional male singers, preventing him from completely carrying their records off into outer space. Holman would have benefited from a similar sandbagging. He’s all about the treble – no bass. And his voice isn’t just incredibly high-pitched; it also has a squeaky edge to it as if he has ingested a dog toy or a songbird. This squeak might have sounded amusing as a character in a cartoon or a puppet show, but it’s a little off-putting when it is heard in a love song.
Holman’s unusual falsetto overwhelms every other facet of the song, transcending entertainment and becoming sort of a scientific curiosity. Exactly how high does this guy’s voice go? And did he need surgery after singing this? These are matters of scholarly interest, but I can’t find any published papers that address them. Even the “Hey There Lonely Girl” sheet music completely dodges the issue. I would expect the written score to fold out at the top to accurately depict the notes in relation to middle C. Alternately, it might invent a new Italian word like “castraggio” to indicate that the vocals are to be performed six octaves higher than they are written. Instead, the notes are placed on the treble staff within the range of a standard tenor, and without any special instructions. The transcribers are probably just trying to save other singers from exploding their larynxes, but it feels like they are rewriting history and erasing Eddie’s achievement.
Most R&B ballads of this variety have some macho bragging in the lyrics, but “Hey There Lonely Girl” has only desperation. This is an incel with a ridiculous voice, and he is singing to a girl who just got royally dumped. The two of them have nothing to lose by hooking up, so they might as well settle for each other. The mutual despair is one of those things – like the humorous falsetto – that makes the song almost bearable to me while ruining it for normal listeners. I don’t love “Hey There Lonely Girl”, but I do love that it annoys the folks who usually enjoy this type of tune.
My rating: 4 / 10
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