Anyone

This song began as a pantyhose advert. Jeannie Seely, then a 23-year-old secretary at Liberty Records, read the line “anyone who knows what comfort is…” and heard something bigger in it. She finished the song with help from a 19-year-old staff writer named Randy Newman, and in 1964 it landed with Irma Thomas, the Soul Queen of New Orleans, who sang it like a woman explaining the obvious to people who will never get it.

The single has one of the strangest fates in pop. Its B-side was “Time Is on My Side” — the song the Rolling Stones promptly covered into their first American top-ten hit, eclipsing the A-side entirely. “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” stalled at number 52 and slipped into obscurity, until Black Mirror dug it up nearly fifty years later and threaded it through episode after episode, a warm human voice drifting through all those cold screens.

None of that afterlife changes what the record is: strings, a slow triplet sway, and Thomas standing firm in the middle of it. “You can blame me, try to shame me, and still I’ll care for you.” Not a plea — a fact.