"Change His Ways" by Robert Palmer (1988)

Aside from cloying humidity and beaded necklaces designed to elicit fleeting nudity from soused dames, southern Louisiana is known for a delightful musical melange of R&B and Creole called zydeco. Largely driven by accordion and guitar, zydeco is custom built for filling the dance floor with ebullient joy, so no matter your age, color, or creed, it's pretty hard to sit still once those propulsive rhythms kick in. So naturally, zydeco connects with people who live for dance music. People like Robert Palmer.

"Change His Ways," a tale of the ebb and flow of a love affair, is a musical outlier on Heavy Nova, but it does feature Palmer's trademark vocal harmonies as the foundation to the zydeco flavors, adding layers of sweetener to a song that doesn't need it but benefits from it. And I haven't even mentioned the yodeling yet. Palmer's peripatetic zest for genre-hopping may be off-putting to some, but tracks like "Change His Ways" offer further evidence that Palmer can serve the song, no matter the genre. Or the yodeling.

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