The Babs/Bergman Experiment

First thing's first---I should acknowledge it's been a while. At least ten mediocre sequels, re-makes, or Freaky Friday rip offs have been released into theatres, and I haven't had the time, resources, or chutzpah to tear them a new one. Instead, I've been doing this little thing called Moving Into College. Many of my friends have too, and I'd like to take this opportunity to quote Adele; "I wish nothing but the best for you, too." Love you guys.

If you want some kind of detailed update on MY life, you know how to contact me, yo. Owl post is probably the fastest way, but a good Skype date shall do nicely. I will say this; I'm currently sitting in the library, chillaxing after successfully registering for a class in New Realism, sipping a Mint Javalanche, and holding newly checked out copies of Sidney Bechet's Best and the Avenue Q cast album....if that doesn't tell you how I happy I am, nothing will. Nothing, except perhaps the news that Barbra Joan Streisand's thirty-third studio album hit shelves yesterday. Those of you who know me well get it; those who are just now getting to know me should be aware that I'm probably the strongest Streisomaniac in the straight white American community. In your lifetime, you get a precious few artists who really connect with you. She's one of mine. She's the one. And yet, this review will be far from a fan-boy droolfest. I've got some issues with this release, ya'll. If you love me, you'll read it. If you like me, you'll skim it. If you hate me, then by all means shut this window and go learn how to shuffle or try to hack your way into Pottermore or something. Anywho...

WHAT MATTERS MOST

"Well, I guess I'm stuck with the leftovers!", Barbra Streisand exclaimed as she closed a recent Grammy tribute to her genius by performing a few numbers of her own. Leftovers, my ass--her expert renderings of "Happy Days Are Here Again", "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" and "Evergreen" were the evening's inevitable piece de resistance. (How do I know? Two words. You. Tube.)

The "leftovers" remark makes more sense when applied to Streisand's latest studio output, What Matters Most. It's a collection of songs with lyrics penned solely by the Bergmans, the legendary husband-and-wife showbiz staple who specialize in short, swooning, hyperbolically emotional pieces written to order for movies, and who have given Babs two of her most memorable hits, "The Way We Were" and "Papa, Can You Hear Me?". They're also close friends of both Barbra and her son Jason, so the decision to honor them with an album all their own makes sense. But the problem is that, while this indeed is her first full-out Bergman extravaganza, she's included several of their songs on almost every album she's released in the past thirty years--indeed, The Way We Were and A Love Like Ours are bursting with so much Bergman that they feel like mini-tributes in themselves. The point is this; having recorded all of the team's greatest hits and plundered a sizable section of their back catalog, Barbra Streisand is stuck with whatever oddities and obscurities remain. This is indeed an album of leftovers, and, to paraphrase Sondheim, out of some she makes a sumptuous feast, and out of others, mere figs.

We begin with the only canonized Bergman classic on the album--"The Windmills of Your Mind". Perhaps their darkest composition ever, this spiralling dirge into vulnerability and despair tends to lend itself to breathy, "haunted" (read; flat) renditions. Not here. Streisand the actress give it an urgently dramatic, fearless reading, even singing a cappella for the first minute of so. It's a classic vocal performance--she navigates the brusque clip of the words and the swooping high notes of the chorus with ease and energy. But with a repeat listen, you notice something; the orchestra just isn't matching Streisand's energy. Until the haunting violin solo at the end of the track, they're simply plunking out the same chords over and over. Therein lies What Matters Most's most urgent problem--the arrangement of the songs themselves pale in comparison to the passion that Streisand contributes to each and every lyric line.

William Ross is responsible for the orchestrations, something that I confess worried me, because I spend my free time worrying about this sort of thing. Ross has worked with Her Majesty before, and the results have been consistently inconsistent. The man is a talented conductor, but doesn't seem to have an innate understanding of that voice (THE voice), and too often buries it in treacly glissandos, half-assed back-up vocals, etc--check out his shoddy work on the mess that was Christmas Memories. However, every now and then, when inspiration strikes him, he'll make a decision that actually benefits Babs's sound--his surging version of "You'll Never Walk Alone" was a stunning addition to her greatest hits album. Here, both Rosses come out to play, but unfortunately the first moreso than the second.

The former Ross is present especially on some of the slower tracks--the ever-present pinging harps on "So Many Stars" de-dramify one of the album's strongest set of lyrics, and on "Solitary Moon", the impossible happens; the insistent Kenny G-style sax and chintzy shaker percussion are so obnoxious that they actually overwhelm Barbra's beautiful vocal. Then again, I ought to lay off Ross, I guess. Some of the missteps on this album aren't actually his fault-some of it's on Streisand for her poor song selection. "Something New In My Life" is a syrupy, hopelessly repetitive power ballad that spends way too much time spinning wink-wink clever rhymes on the word "new" to actually mean much of anything, and the aforementioned orchestral clutter of "Moon" isn't helped by its faux-sexy verses that try far too hard for bedroom beauty, but instead descend into minor camp. Some of these songs aren't recorded often for a reason. They're beneath Barbra, and they make me want to cry.

Then again, we all know that when Streisand does right, she does very right, and tears of joy were a part of my listening experience as well. Her take on Sinatra's "Nice 'n' Easy" is bliss--she sounds as relaxed here is she did on her last masterpiece, 2009's Love Is The Answer, and she contributes a buttery sensuality to the classic chorus as the piano follows her every move. Ross helps her out on "The Same Hello, The Same Goodbye", devising a string-heavy slow build that allows her to slowly but steadily marshal her indomitable force of will and then let loose with her trademark belt; the cumulative effect packs a wallop, due in no small part to the fact that she's won back a few of the high notes she lost on her 2006 tour. "That Face" finds her returning to big-band roots, and she's right at home, juicing up phrases like "asleep or awake, it's second to none!" with a swinging vitality that'd give Bobby Darin a hard-on.

The crowning jewel is undoubtedly "Alone in the World", one of her best ballads and a true discovery, featuring superb backup by trumpeter Chris Botti. Here's an orchestration that enhances the vocal instead of detracting from it. As Botti flits between notes with his typical grace, Streisand delivers a knockout set of lyrics that blur the line between love song and lonely plea, balancing her burnished lower register and crystalline head voice without showing a single sign of strain, going deeper and deeper into the world of the song and taking us right along with her. As the soaring bridge draws to a close, Streisand unfurls the final chorus slowly, savoring each syllable and sprinkling her tonal purity about like stardust until she reaches the phrase "sleep inside my arms", which she delivers with such quiet, unforced conviction that those four words become a glimmering universe unto themselves. As she held the final note and Botti trumpet slid up the scale to meet her up there in the heavens, tears rolled down my face, and my fingernails dug into my bed. Thank God my suitemates weren't around for this.

The album draws to a close with the title song, a short, seemingly simple lyric with deep wells of hidden meaning. Streisand mines every word for all it's worth, singing softly and sincerely against the spare accompaniment. It's the perfect closer, because it reminds us what a rare birdie she is, even if she doesn’t show off her full wingspan this time around. The belting, the phrasing, and that peerless tone are all important, but what makes Barbra great is her respect for the music. She aims for nothing less than total fusion with her songs, and when she succeeds, it feels like a hand has reached out and taken yours. You're a little less lonely, a little less frightened, a little less hurt when listening to her, and though this album is wildly uneven at times, it's far from negligible, for at its best it reminds you just how great the greatest singer of the 20th century is, and why she's the top, the Colosseum, the Louvre Museum. What Matters Most? Her generous heart.

Album as a whole: B. Just to put this in perspective, I gave her last effort, Love Is The Answer, an A+. It's place in the Streisand canon: Somewhere in the middle, with other hit-and-miss efforts such as Barbra Joan Streisand and Back to Broadway “Alone in the World”: A+.

For Dan and Ally

I really thought I shouldn't do this, and couldn't do it without coming off as exploitative or just plain silly. But in the face of sadness, after losing my beloved puppy dog and two good classmates in one summer, this is one I HAVE to write.

I deal with language. I sing it. I write it. I love it, and here's why; language is a net that reigns in a world that too often seems to be running away from us, or even with us. When we describe something, a little piece of our world becomes knowable, if not totally understandable. It's my desire to use it here to maybe hold down a world that in the past few hours, has been nothing less than out of control.

But I begin with the admission that there are times when the demands are too much; when we try to write down what we have come to know and we bend the words into strange new shapes and they break. There are no words for what happened to Ally and Dan. None. Never will be. But there are words for us, I think, and here are a few.

Whatever pain they were spared or better place they've arrived at can't really provide a suitable salve for the pain we feel; we can't apply the bandage when, in all honesty, we don't know where it hurts. For me, there is no joy to be found in this, and no comfort, at least not now. To allow ourselves to believe there is seems wrong- "seems" being the key word--these are opinions, not assertions. What we're left with, then, is knowledge. Knowledge that though some of us may sob in a crowd and others retreat to our rooms, some grieve for a year, others for a day, at the moment we're all hurting, every one of us and we don't know where, how much, or for how long. When you feel as if something very dear has slipped through you fingers, you can at least know that many others are also holding out empty palms. When you know you cannot articulate what you feel, you may at least rest assured in the knowledge that the only thing anyone can articulate right now is how inarticulate they are. If you're walking around with a hole where something should be, know that it isn't just you. Stephen Sondheim summed up what I just wrote in a single lyric line: "No one is alone, truly."

A note on where we go from here. Death may mean the world to the dead, but to us, it has no purpose, unlike it's opposite birth, which is naturally the assignation of place and thus of purpose. So try not to focus on the fact that, because they're gone so soon, you fear you might not live to a ripe old age, either. Instead, look at all they folded into the few years they had. The randomness of death is terrifying, yes, but the randomness of life is beautiful. In defiance of science and reason and sometimes even fate, good people are born into this world. They run around it with eyes wide open and blood pumping furiously, and they leave their imprints all over. Again, for proof that I'm no Pulitzer winner, look at the Man Himself, JRR Tolkien, who said it best;

‎"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

I recommend writing down your thoughts about the situation, even if you never share them. I recommend leaning on your friends, or even people you don't know--hell, if anyone's reading this and needs to talk, I'd be more than happy to listen. But most of all, try to pull off the impossible trick of sobbing and smiling all at once. Weep for two wonderful people who were taken from us, regardless of where they are now. But also smile, not just because they were given time but, against the astronomical odds of the vast, cold cosmos, you were given time, and to the best of your knowledge, you still have a great deal left.

In conclusion, I think everything has its currency; we pay for sustenance with money, friends with time, and love with loss. It's the steepest price there is, but only in paying it do we find the sweetest rewards. What I hoped I've conveyed with my language tonight, ladies and gents, is that even in times like these you aren't alone, and you are alive. I can't think of two more important things to write about, or to read about. From the Torah, or Jewish Bible; "Zekher ẓaddik liverakhah--may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing."

Love you all. Sleep well, and see many of you tomorrow.