the recordings. To indicate specific licks he wanted emphasized for certain songs, Charles would put together voice-and-piano demos and pass them along to the arrangers, informing them of what he wanted to do with specific sounds. According to Feller, at one point during recording, Charles rewrote an entire botched arrangement and dictated the parts to each of the 18 backing musicians. Music and lyrics The album's themes are about heartbreak and love, with most of the material chosen by Charles being ballads. The concept which had originally attracted the interest of Charles to this style of music was the strength he admired in writing a ballad's somber or melancholy lyrics and then performing the ballad with aesthetic and emotional stability; an element he had found to be common in even the most diverse musical genres. Writer Daniel Cooper said of Charles's adaptation of country elements, "His country forays play like a series of intricate variations or like one long meditation on the expansive qualities of music commonly described as the white man's blues." AllMusic's Stephen Cook writes that "Charles intones the sleepy-blue nuances of country crooners while still giving the songs a needed kick with his gospel outbursts." Despite the racial and social implications of R&B and country at the time, Charles did not agree with contemporary views of race records and other genres, including pop and country, as essentially different. In an interview with Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone, Charles said of the similarities between the blues and country music, "[T]he words to country songs are very earthy like the blues, see, very down. They're not as dressed up, and the people are very honest and say, 'Look, I miss you, darlin', so I went out and I got drunk in this bar.' That's the way you say it. Where in Tin Pan Alley will say, 'Oh, I missed you darling, so I went to this restaurant and I sat down and I had dinner for one.' That's cleaned up now, you see? But country songs and the blues is like it is." In an interview with music historian Peter Guralnick, Charles further elaborated on his understanding, stating "You take country music, you take black music, you got the same goddamn thing exactly." While Modern Sounds features mostly covers of country and western music standards, its sound and musical style are marked by the heavy rhythm and blues influence