Barbra Streisand

[Made In America]

[Moderator's note: This thread is a spin-off from a Carpenters thread and it drifted into Streisand conversation, so it has been relocated here.]

I do listen to a number of Christmas albums and "My Favorite Things" only appears on the Carpenters Old-,Fashioned Chrilstmas.

You really should check out the Barbra Streisand Christmas Album then. Some of recordings on that album rival the best selections from the Carpenters Christmas albums.

1967: Barbra Streisand on her album A Christmas Album

 

[Mary Beth]

You really should check out the Barbra Streisand Christmas Album then. Some of recordings on that album rival the best selections from the Carpenters Christmas albums.

1967: Barbra Streisand on her album A Christmas Album

Streisand's is an immaculate album, and her voice was at a new peak of its richness and phrasing. I totally agree that they do rival Carpenters versions, and perhaps in the case of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", actually surpasses their version. It may have something to do with the vocal, Barbra sounds more spirited and Karen's sounds more tired and a bit phoned in.

 

[Mark-T]

Sure, Streisand's album is a good one, but she doesn't sound like she is really personally invested or believes in what she is singing. That's the Karen difference.

Welcome to the Boards, Mary Beth!

 

[Mary Beth]

Sure, Streisand's album is a good one, but she doesn't sound like she is really personally invested or believes in what she is singing. That's the Karen difference.

Welcome to the Boards, Mary Beth!

Thank you! I'm a fan of both but much more of Karen (no other voice cuts right to my soul), I do think in the late 60s and 70s Barbra could really give a song soulfulness, warmth and feeling, but in other eras I totally agree that her performances could be very technical and detached emotionally. I was just talking about that one track as an instance where I got more emotiveneas from Barbra. And Karen's isn't a bad perf at all, I just feel that it doesn't have the power or emotion that the other Christmas tracks have.

 

[Mark-T]

That's a great explanation of Barbra: "very technical and detached emotionally". There are many tracks of hers I like (For All We Know, Superman, Guilty, Woman in Love, to name a few- how could there not be with thousands of albums? ), but I usually don't get the warm, human element through the voice.

 

[Mary Beth]

That's a great explanation of Barbra: "very technical and detached emotionally". There are many tracks of hers I like (For All We Know, Superman, Guilty, Woman in Love, to name a few- how could there not be with thousands of albums? ), but I usually don't get the warm, human element through the voice.

Try listening to her early 70s stuff in particular - Stoney End to Lazy Afternoon - to me that's where I hear the most consistent display of soul and warmth from her. Her unique phrasings and belting power here aren't just used to show off her astounding technical gifts but in service of the lyrics and music, I feel at least. But the difference between this era and others of hers are staggering. Most of her 60s stuff (technical, more detached), which I still love in doses and appreciate, sounds radically different than her 70s sound.

Karen's, of course, always possessed an innate warmth and aching humanity no matter what era or year.

 

[Made In America]

I don't know if I would ever dare to compare or consider a competition when it comes to vocal effectiveness between Karen and Barbra. Each vocalist captures a special place in my heart instead of either one dominating my heart. The voices are not similar at all, but I melt the same way when I hear each one interpret a good song. If the song isn't right, then either one suffers similarly. But when it comes to the Christmas albums, they both shine so bright.

 

[Mary Beth]

I don't know if I would ever dare to compare or consider a competition when it comes to vocal effectiveness between Karen and Barbra. Each vocalist captures a special place in my heart instead of either one dominating my heart. The voices are not similar at all, but I melt the same way when I hear each one interpret a good song. If the song isn't right, then either one suffers similarly. But when it comes to the Christmas albums, they both shine so bright.

It's hard to compare them because their natural vocal styles are very different. I'm a huge fan of both like I said, and they both have the gift of a beautiful, golden tone, technical ability, and a wellspring of ache to tap into. But I think it's valid as two fellow female vocalists to compare them on a certain level, if you think about it objectively.

Hearing Barbra's album you can hear how much her voice had developed over those four short years from her first album; a new richness of tonal/emotional depth and warmth and it's magic. I will say that aside from some tracks on Guilty and TBA her voice started to lose its warmth and human element in the 80s and throughout the 90s, and her once immaculate phrasings became bland and trite. In the 2000's when her voice became much less elastic she was able to focus on the emotional elememt of a song again how she phrased it.

 

[Made In America]

It's hard to compare them because their natural vocal styles are very different. I'm a huge fan of both like I said, and they both have the gift of a beautiful, golden tone, technical ability, and a wellspring of ache to tap into. But I think it's valid as two fellow female vocalists to compare them on a certain level, if you think about it objectively.

Hearing Barbra's album you can hear how much her voice had developed over those four short years from her first album; a new richness of tonal/emotional depth and warmth and it's magic. I will say that aside from some tracks on Guilty and TBA her voice started to lose its warmth and human element in the 80s and throughout the 90s, and her once immaculate phrasings became bland and trite. In the 2000's when her voice became much less elastic she was able to focus on the emotional elememt of a song again how she phrased it.

The material probably has a lot to do with your perception of changes in the 80's and 90's when she tried to be more contemporary with the changing landscape of music. But I can point to amazing emotional vocal performances on each 80's/90's album, such as "Papa Can You Hear Me?" from Yentl (1983), "Clear Sailing" from Emotion (1984), "All I Ask Of You" from Till I Loved You (1988), and "Children Will Listen" from Back To Broadway (1993) to demonstrate she never lost vocal substance and was hardly bland & trite when she had the proper vehicle to showcase that spectacular voice.

 

[Mary Beth]

The material probably has a lot to do with your perception of changes in the 80's and 90's when she tried to be more contemporary with the changing landscape of music. But I can point to amazing emotional vocal performances on each 80's/90's album, such as "Papa Can You Hear Me?" from Yentl (1983), "Clear Sailing" from Emotion (1984), "All I Ask Of You" from Till I Loved You (1988), and "Children Will Listen" from Back To Broadway (1993) to demonstrate she never lost vocal substance and was hardly bland & trite when she had the proper vehicle to showcase that spectacular voice.

Emotion and TILY are the nadir of her career and I literally hate every song on each of them. The 80s had some lousy AC schlock and those two albums showed the worst of that era. I forgot about Yentyl and there were some gems on that and even some highlights on BTB (I've
never been in love is amazing) but much of it was oversung and overproduced.

I think a part of it is that she just wasn't a very adventurous artist. After the 70s she either picked the worst kind of pop who just went back to the old standards that sounded better in the 60s. She never explored so many of the great contemporary songwriters and arrangers after the 1970s, songs that she could have lent a whole new dimension too. I appreciate but don't wholly love her 00's stuff, it's inspired and she's back in good voice but the arrangements can be very samey. I just wish she could work with a sophisticated, modern adult pop sound, or even older covers with a fresh sound.

It's sad to me that she never truly enjoyed her foray into pop; the way she talks about it now sounds like she was basically dragged away from her bread and butter standards and made to do it. But listening to those recordings she sounds more electrifying and alive than ever and never phoned it in, so it's interesting.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

I have no idea bout this, but I wonder if Streisand's "detached" sound on her Christmas album might have something to do with her being Jewish, and thus maybe not as "invested" in the Christmas season as Karen was? I am aware that a lot of Jewish people celebrate Christmas in some way or another, but maybe Barbra did a Christmas album back then because all concerned figured it would be a big seller, not because she had a great fondness for yuletide music.

 

[Made In America]

Emotion and TILY are the nadir of her career and I literally hate every song on each of them. The 80s had some lousy AC schlock and those two albums showed the worst of that era. I forgot about Yentyl and there were some gems on that and even some highlights on BTB (I've
never been in love is amazing) but much of it was oversung and overproduced.

I think a part of it is that she just wasn't a very adventurous artist. After the 70s she either picked the worst kind of pop who just went back to the old standards that sounded better in the 60s. She never explored so many of the great contemporary songwriters and arrangers after the 1970s, songs that she could have lent a whole new dimension too. I appreciate but don't wholly love her 00's stuff, it's inspired and she's back in good voice but the arrangements can be very samey. I just wish she could work with a sophisticated, modern adult pop sound, or even older covers with a fresh sound.

It's sad to me that she never truly enjoyed her foray into pop; the way she talks about it now sounds like she was basically dragged away from her bread and butter standards and made to do it. But listening to those recordings she sounds more electrifying and alive than ever and never phoned it in, so it's interesting.

Ironically you state she wasn't a very adventurous artist, yet you state you hated every song on the Emotion album. That was the album she paired with Jim Steinman, who was the hottest and most adventurous producer/songwriter of the time. She paired with Kim Carnes, who was another hot artist at the time. It followed the same path of the Guilty album with Barry Gibb in 1980 and her dabbling in disco with her duet with Donna Summer in 1979. Her relationship with Don Johnson did mess up her TILY album a bit, but even it had some moments.

You suffer from the fandom curse where careers are categorized instead of judging individual songs. It's one of the most challenging aspects of reading the posts from Carpenters fans where they state how Karen should have saved her image and popularity by doing something different to retain her popularity of the early 70's. They don't understand the life cycle of an artist. They don't understand that some of her latter material has the same substance of the earlier material. In fact, sometimes it is actually better. No matter what an artist does, they will never be able to captivate the freshness and excitement of when they were introduced to the world. It's an impossible and unreasonable expectation.

An example of your handicap is the song "Clear Sailing" from the Emotion LP. For you to make a blanket statement that you "hate" every song on the Emotion album when that recording is probably one of the top 10 best album cuts by any artist in the 80's is very telling.

Music fans can generally be placed into 3 categories:
1. Love everything by an artist
2. Hate segments or career periods by an artist (they almost always prefer the early recordings)
3. Judge each recording individually no matter the release date, musical style, etc

On message boards, the #1 and #2 fans are easy to identify. I am almost always #3, whether that be Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, or any artist. But there are examples where I am very close to being #1. The Carpenters is a good example as they are probably as close to #1 as I can possibly get because the combination of Karen's vocals and Richard's production rarely fails. The only time I really saw Karen generally fail was with her solo album, but that really wasn't the Carpenters. Of course, the Carpenters career span was only a little over a decade so maybe they would have eventually fell into #3 had Karen lived. The longer the career span, the more an artist falls into #3 for me. That is where Barbra Streisand lands for me. From what you have written, you would probably be #2.

 

[Made In America]

I have no idea bout this, but I wonder if Streisand's "detached" sound on her Christmas album might have something to do with her being Jewish, and thus maybe not as "invested" in the Christmas season as Karen was? I am aware that a lot of Jewish people celebrate Christmas in some way or another, but maybe Barbra did a Christmas album back then because all concerned figured it would be a big seller, not because she had a great fondness for yuletide music.

Oh heavens, we weren't talking about detachment on her Christmas album. I believe that is where Mary Beth and I completely agree that it is a stunning showcase of vocal excellence.

 

[Mary Beth]

Ironically you state she wasn't a very adventurous artist, yet you state you hated every song on the Emotion album. That was the album she paired with Jim Steinman, who was the hottest and most adventurous producer/songwriter of the time. She paired with Kim Carnes, who was another hot artist at the time. It followed the same path of the Guilty album with Barry Gibb in 1980 and her dabbling in disco with her duet with Donna Summer in 1979. Her relationship with Don Johnson did mess up her TILY album a bit, but even it had some moments.

You suffer from the fandom curse where careers are categorized instead of judging individual songs. It's one of the most challenging aspects of reading the posts from Carpenters fans where they state how Karen should have saved her image and popularity by doing something different to retain her popularity of the early 70's. They don't understand the life cycle of an artist. They don't understand that some of her latter material has the same substance of the earlier material. In fact, sometimes it is actually better. No matter what an artist does, they will never be able to captivate the freshness and excitement of when they were introduced to the world. It's an impossible and unreasonable expectation.

An example of your handicap is the song "Clear Sailing" from the Emotion LP. For you to make a blanket statement that you "hate" every song on the Emotion album when that recording is probably one of the top 10 best album cuts by any artist in the 80's is very telling.

Music fans can generally be placed into 3 categories:
1. Love everything by an artist
2. Hate segments or career periods by an artist (they almost always prefer the early recordings)
3. Judge each recording individually no matter the release date, musical style, etc

On message boards, the #1 and #2 fans are easy to identify. I am almost always #3, whether that be Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, or any artist. But there are examples where I am very close to being #1. The Carpenters is a good example as they are probably as close to #1 as I can possibly get because the combination of Karen's vocals and Richard's production rarely fails. The only time I really saw Karen generally fail was with her solo album, but that really wasn't the Carpenters. Of course, the Carpenters career span was only a little over a decade so maybe they would have eventually fell into #3 had Karen lived. The longer the career span, the more an artist falls into #3 for me. That is where Barbra Streisand lands for me. From what you have written, you would probably be #2.

But the so called adventurousness you believe she demonstrates on Emotion to me is meaningless because the songs don't hold up for me; crappy 80s arrangements that lack the freshness and staying power of her best work. I know that it's not her fault per se and she was just following the trend to stay relevant in the pop sphere, but those albums are pretty bad even by the standards of that era (and "Clear Sailing" I don't feel is a gem like you think it is, a good vocal but not distinctive enough a track). Guilty isn't a bad album but the only song on it I'm fond of is "The Love Inside". You get the sense that she did these albums at the suggestions and persuasions of other people and not a genuine desire to explore new avenues.

And I do judge a song individually, it's just that with Barbra she rarely did an album with much variety after the 70s; meaning that chances are that if I don't like one song I'm probably not going to like the rest. Of course I hear the whole album and never pass judgement.

With Karen I think people fans wanted her to change things up because her wide popularity started a kind of decline in 1976 and because of her early death they wish she stayed popular and fresh longer because of such little time she had left.

As for those categories I'm basically in the #1 as well, and that's largely due to the fact, like you said, that it was the same winning team of singer and arranger until the end. This is compared to Streisand who often had many different arrangers on a single album, making it lopsided and uneven in tone. I understand why a variety of arrangers could be seen as daring but on a single album it rarely works. She needed to do something like Linda Ronstadt did with Nelson Riddle, find one arranger who could could work with her on one album or a few and establish that kind of relationship.

(A reason I'm iffy on her beloved first Broadway album is that she didn't do what Linda did, a straight throwback with no contemporary arrangements in the mix. The synths and all of that ruin classic songs that should have been done in a completely old school fashion - Somewhere in particular sounds retched.)

 

[Made In America]

But you can't have it both ways. You can't say she needed to be adventurous and then complain she was adventurous. I would agree that songs like "Left In The Dark" were failures at trying to expand her limits with exploring the latest trends. But taking risks really paid off for me (and her) in the 80's with "Woman In Love" and "Somewhere". Simply magical and the public responded accordingly. "Clear Sailing" was a bit of a throwback to her 60's/70's style as she didn't want to completely abandon what made her legendary. But even in that song, there was some ingenious bass work that you will not be able to hear on YouTube, but only on a good stereo system where my bass speaker really pounds. It was another dimension that I haven't heard in her prior recordings that really worked well. Even "Memory" allowed her to keep fans of her old work satisfied.

Believe it or not, I didn't like Linda Ronstadt's "What's New" album that much. Rehashing old standards with similar arrangements did little for me. I love variety and that is why I think Barbra kept my interest with some of her songs throughout the decade. Sure, there were misses. But the best in the business wanted to work with her and when it clicked, it really clicked. Two of the biggest albums of her career were from the 80s with "Guilty" and "The Broadway Album". Those extended her longevity as a viable recording artist well beyond what most singers have accomplished. In that regard, she did something right.

We started this conversation discussing Christmas albums. What did you think of her most recent Christmas album? I really enjoyed it. There is something about her voice and Karen's voice that adds so much spirit to seasonal offerings.