"The New York Times" music journalist Stephen Holden would vaunt "Blue Velvet" as one of the four tracks which defined the first phase of Bennett's recording career: according to Holden "Blue Velvet" along with "Because of You" (1951), "Cold, Cold Heart" (1951), and "Stranger in Paradise" (1953), "stand as the gorgeous final flowering of the high-romantic style invented in the 1940s by Sinatra arranger Axel Stordahl. Pure and throbbing, ...Bennett's voice adds a semi-operatic heft to Sinatra's more intimate crooning style. Male pop singing since [the mid-1950s has never been unabashedly sweet." In 1957 Bennett would begin a longstanding working relationship with jazz pianist Ralph Sharon who Bennett would recall advised him: "If you keep singing...sweet saccharine songs like 'Blue Velvet' sooner or later...you're going to stop selling [records" and with his 1957 album "The Beat of My Heart" - produced and conducted by Sharon - Bennett had launched a new musical persona as an intensely intimate song stylist.