Time Is on My Side

Need your heartache to be all encompassing? To have a gospel-strength voice convey that exact physical feeling of total despair? Do you want it all to feel so smooth and enticing that you wish to experience it all over again? That’s the speedball of emotions that Irma Thomas delivers when singing the songs of Allen Toussaint. Of the many special relationships the man fostered over the decades, Thomas was the muse that could elicit his most emotional writing. “He knew he could depend on me to sing it the way he wanted it sung,” as Thomas told the NY Times. “He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit. And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.” Toussaint pens about a third of the songs here, songs that can make you feel like you’re soaring and plummeting in equal measure.