Pop was his medium, whether it was 45s or individual songs, and when they're collected as a body of work as they are on Bear Family's eight-disc Oh Carol: The Complete Recordings 1956-1966, the result is a little exhausting. That doesn't necessarily mean that his work lends itself to the exhaustive Bear Family box set treatment, though. This means some of his recordings are inextricably tied to their era, but he was such a savvy songwriter that the best of his work - such as "Oh Carol," "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen," "Calendar Girl," and "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," which is his greatest song - has stood the test of the time, while still standing as the sound of the early '60s. His heyday was in the early '60s, when rock & roll was in recession and before the Beatles came across the Atlantic and changed everything, and in a way, he epitomized the era - he wasn't rock & roll, he was informed by it, but he was at his heart a pop tunesmith, and his best songs, whether performed by him or not, were in the Tin Pan Alley tradition but given a contemporary polish to appeal to the kids. Neil Sedaka never gets the respect that he deserves because he's a man out of time.
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