The first time ever I heard the song.

It was engineered like a chamber music performance; appropriately, given Roberta Flack’s classical music background. 

The production wasn’t lush. It was extremely spare - significant given popular music’s headlong rush towards over-production at the time (even though the track was recorded three years earlier). 

Flack believed the production to be too slow. The engineer had created a four-minute dream set to the rhythm of a sleeping heart rate in which a lover lies content, dreaming a soliloquy of happiness: or loss? A foreground double bass opens, and a classical guitar sheds teardrops of joy - or despair - in the mid-ground, before piano - and vocal - notes emerge so tentatively you can hear the studio air around them. 

The song’s string arrangement by William Fischer is extraordinary, blending violas and cello into an emotional counterpoint that could be fateful, anticipatory, ominous,  portentous, celebratory, frightening or omniscient … depending on whether the face, the subject of the song, is still around or not. The joy of ecstasy is as acute as the pain of loss - and how mercilessly close the two are. 

To answer the heading: the first time I heard the Flack song creeping out of the radio in my teenage bedroom it had already arm-wrestled a number of iconic songs out of the way on its bullet-ride to number one. These included Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without You’, another piano-riven masterpiece; and also incidentally, a cover version. 

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(Thanks to Shio who opened her PBS radio show Eternal Rhythm on Thursday morning with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ by Roberta Flack, who died earlier this week.)