‘We might have gone too far with being PC’
The actor and musician on his new album and lyrics from a different time
Harry Connick Junior was the recipient of one Tinseltown’s prized accolades recently when he was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is in recognition of a career that took off with his appearance in the 1990 war movie Memphis Belle singing Danny Boy while playing the part of Sergeant Clay Busby. That was just over a year after millions heard his version of It Had To Be You in the classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally. A versatile actor, he was chilling when cast against type as serial killer Daryll Lee Cullum in 1995’s Copycat.
It is, however, for his musicianship that he is most widely recognised and it is appropriate that his star on Hollywood Boulevard now appears beside that of Cole Porter.
The latest album by the 52-year-old New Orleans performer is called True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter. On a visit to Ireland last week, he told me in
‘If I didn’t think [Porter’s songs] were relevant to me I wouldn’t have done them’
Dublin’s plush Dylan Hotel that immersing himself in the canon of the great Indiana songwriter was ‘like putting on a really comfortable pair of shoes’.
‘Interpreting the songs of Cole Porter is a little like sitting in front of some beautiful landscape with a bunch of brushes and you don’t really know what it’s going to turn out like,’ he says.
‘You can be photo-realistic or impressionistic or whatever you want but you find yourself working, coming back to work within the confines of your own (and his) parameters. That’s the fun part.’
Not only is Connick a celebrated interpreter of the songs of the great American songbook, songs he himself composed such as Every Man Should Know have become live favourites on his concert tours. The approach he takes to singing his own work, he says, differs little from his covering of much-loved standards.
‘I like always to be in the moment, so if I have done my job, I have gone through these lyrics and I know exactly what they’re saying, taken everything down to the studs, if you like, then I can present that,’ he says.
‘It’s the same as in this situation [our interview]. I don’t know what you are going to ask me. We could go anywhere,’ he laughs.
‘That’s why I don’t like being prepped for an interview because people reading will not get an honest response if I have had time to think about it a lot. When I’m singing my own lyric, if I’ve done it right, I’m in an alternate world, where I’m the character of the person singing the lyrics.’
So, I ask him, given that some of Porter’s songs were written over 90 years ago, what happens when he is faced with a song with less than politically correct lyrics. Though I won’t reproduce them here, the original words of the chorus of Porter’s Let’s Fall In Love didn’t talk about birds, bees
and fleas doing it. John Legend, for example has released a postMeToo version of Baby It’s Cold
Outside. Would he change lyrics to fit the mores of these times?
‘That would be like changing Shakespeare. I wouldn’t do the song if I didn’t like it. Who am I to change something to make it politically correct?’ He asks.
‘I think we might have gone too far with that anyway. You have to consider the context in which these songs were written…No disrespect to Baby It’s Cold Outside but we are talking about some of the greatest lyrics in the history of popular music. If I didn’t think they were relevant to me I wouldn’t have done them.’
Connick’s Cole-powered project isn’t ending with the album, he is Broadway-bound, with a show which he has written and directed based on the record which opens at the Nederlander Theatre next month.
‘In the fall of next year, we’re going to take it all over the world and I would hope that Ireland would be among those places,’ he says.
One of Connick’s ancestors comes from the village of Rathfriland in Co. Down and came to America in the 1750s.
‘I haven’t had any time on this trip to get to see the country, but I have had the chance before and I want to make the time when I’m back next year I hope,’ he says.
‘My daughter, who is with me has been saying, “What are we doing? Why aren’t we here longer?” So, I have to come back with my family next year.’