Listening to Some Lovers, the new Bacharach album, even though it's not really his - it was produced with Broadway singers, the producers were not Bacharach, the orchestrations are by Jonathan Tunick, who orchestrated the production of this show back in 2011 at the Old Globe. You know that I love Mr. Bacharach and have for almost sixty-five years now. And the problems with this album have nothing to do with him, the main problems are the horrible lyrics by Steven Sater, lyricist of Spring Awakening, which I can't even listen to. The songs are very musically Bacharach and he's still got it, but there are no instantly memorable things here, but Sater is not Hal David or any of the other lyricists that Bacharach has worked with. I also think the album if fussily produced, a bit inconsistent, and some might say overproduced - it's really hard to make Kristen Chenoweth sound like some singer we've never heard. It's supposedly based on O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, but I don't know that story, but I'm thinking they should precede the word "based on" with "loosely". There's a song called This Christmas, but I like mine better
And then there are the singers - I'm just enamored of this new crop of Broadway singers - the men all sound the same and so do the women.
