Streisand goes back to the vault
Her record label says Barbra Streisand has “hand-picked” the songs on Release Me 2, as though they were fresh flowers or pieces of vintage jewelry. The 10 tracks are castoffs, unreleased recordings from her personal archive.
They have been “quietly resting in their tape boxes, waiting to be released,” the singer says. Imagine songbirds, catatonic with boredom in a cage. One day, the door opens and a Streisandian hand beckons them out. Freedom! But have they forgotten how to fly?
The album is the sequel to a previous visit to the archive, 2012’s Release Me. The almost decade-long gap is not due to the vault’s emptiness. Streisand has a well-stocked trove of artifacts from her uniquely successful all-rounder’s career in music, theatre, TV and film. Her unshared work is an object of tantalized speculation from her army of hardcore fans. They dream of finally hearing the gospel songs she recorded with Leon Russell or her abandoned 1973 concept album Life Cycle of a Woman. There is much from which to hand-pick.
Her first Release Me compilation came with snippets of studio chat, male technicians saying things like “She might be right” as they sensibly paid heed to her advice. Release Me 2 has almost no equivalent moments of eavesdropping, which gives it a more perfunctory presentation. The only ad libbed comments come during a 2005 recording of the Barry Gibb-written duet If Only You Were Mine, when the singer breaks off from singing to say the tune sounds like Singin’ in the Rain.
“I like your pompoms,” she adds with a chuckle during Gibbs’s wordless vocal harmonies.
Covering six decades of recordings, some of the songs’ musical arrangements have been changed or overdubbed, but Streisand’s sung parts are unaltered. Not all the tracks take flight. Rainbow Connection is a Muppets song featuring a dull-sounding Kermit: The irrepressible frog is unusually abashed next to Streisand’s majestic voice. I’d Want It to Be You, a duet with Willie Nelson that was rejected from her 2014 album Partners, also fails to spark. Schmaltzy platitudes about companionship are delivered by a mismatched pair of singers: impeccably pitched vibrato from her, gruff informality from him.
These choices are poor substitutes for real curios like the absent gospel experiments with Russell. But others manage to soar. Be Aware is a classy 1971 version of a Burt Bacharach and Hal David composition. A 1974 cover of Carole King’s You Light Up My Life finds the singer in sophisticated adult-contemporary mode.
“With so many memories, where do you begin?” she cries in Once You’ve Been in Love, from the unfinished Life Cycle of a Woman project. It comes at the end of the album, a teasing act of circularity as the door to the vault swings shut again.