“Just Because”
Song by Ray Charles
Ray Charles’ excellent 1979 album Ain’t It So includes the stirring “Just Because”, a mid-tempo and dramatic performance full of raging peaks and quiet valleys.
The song is credited to the somewhat obscure trio of Robert Sitoussi (a.k.a. Fitoussi, later stage name F. R. David), Marco Tobaly, and Michael Wendroff. Ray’s version later appeared in the 1985 Rob Reiner movie The Sure Thing, starring a young John Cusack.
“Just Because” starts liltingly, flutes leading the charge with a warped, phased guitar in tow. It’s a nicely gentle opening, because when Ray starts singing, his voice is mixed high and loud, and balances the lightness of the opening very well.
Ray’s singing on “Just Because” is outstanding. The lyrics and melody of the song are custom-built for the nuance and turmoil which Ray adroitly infuses his performance with. He seems to find real emotion in the intriguing and cinematic lyrics, and each line seems to have been fashioned in a meticulous way to wring all the sentiment possible out of it.
Then dream on
Yeah dream on
Dream and all this magnificence is yours
It’ll never slip away
Messrs. Sitoussi, Tobaly, and Wendroff achieved a truly wondrous marriage of melody and lyrics on “Just Because” – both are complicated in structure but rawly emotional at heart. Only a master like Ray Charles could have inhabited and wrested such feeling out of a song as subtly complex as this.
Unusually for Ray, the solo on “Just Because” to be handled by a distorted electric guitar which cuts through the track with razor sharpness before giving way to a high-register trumpet. It scales ever-greater heights before ending in silence, whereupon Ray begins to sing once more in a riveting, percussion-less restatement of the main melody.
Single releases
“Just Because”
b/w
“Love Me Or Set Me Free”
Listen to “Just Because”
Songs on Ain't It So