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I found Nick Decaro’s cover of I’m Gonna Make You Love Me on a sunshine pop compilation I bought a few years back. I thought it was so completely wrong the first time I heard it, but now I’ve come around to thinking that it’s actually on par with the original. The two versions are very different in tone and execution. Decaro gives the song a lounge/muzak interpretation. It's strange for sure, but somehow it works, though I could swear I hear the high-pitch whir of a dentist’s drill squealing ever so slightly in the background. The affect is casual and blurry, almost narcotic, and it makes you feel the way you do after the first gin and tonic kicks in. And then there’s the song’s sentiment, the force of will one tries to impose when in the throes of total infatuation. In Diana Ross' hands, you truly believe that she’s gonna make him love her, yes she will, yes she will. But when Decaro sings it, you’re not so sure. You wonder if it’s the liquor talking, expressing the brazen self-assuredness on the way up that, on the way down, will inevitably turn back on itself and become little more than the empty wish it really is...