Love in the Early Morning: Two Songs About Making Love to Milkmen [7']

Joelle Wallach’s Love in the Early Morning, two songs about making love to milkmen  is a serio-comic songcycle of lust and longing, sexual fantasy and domestic comedy.

Love in the Early Morning is sung by a housewife with a fantasy – or practice – of seducing her local milkman and is based on poems by two living Americans, Madeline Tiger and Susan Donnelly.

Women’s unrequited sexual and romantic longing have been the subject of male composers as distinct and respected as Mozart, Verdi and Bernstein.  But those male composers’ women have usually been seen as ridiculous, evil or at best pathetic.  These new songs, clearly penned in the hand of a woman, portray the poignancy of yearning side by side with its powerful lustiness and rollicking humor:  the social nicety of “Milkman, do we have it straight”  giving way to the plangent cry of “Morning ticks” with its desperate tenderness.

• Making Love to the Milkman
• Milkman, Eggs Please