Product Description

This has to be Stacey Kent's finest album yet. With no less than 16 fantastic interpretations of songs made famous by male icons during Stacey's adolescence, this album features tracks ranging all the way from The Best Is Yet To Come (Tony Bennett), The Boy Next Door (Frank Sinatra) to Dizzy Gillespie's Ooh Shoobee Doo Bee and James Taylor's You've Got A Friend. This is sure to be a Grammy nominee and a must-have for any lover of the American popular songbook.

Track Listing

1. THE BEST IS YET TO COME
2. THE BOY NEXT DOOR
3. THE TROLLEY SONG
4. SAY IT ISN'T SO
5. TOO DARN HOT
6. MAKIN' WHOOPPEE
7. WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE
8. YOU'VE GOT A FRIEND
9. I GOT IT BAD
10. OOH-SHOOBEE-DOO-BEE
11. PEOPLE WILL SAY WE'RE IN LOVE
12. 'TIS AUTUMN
13. ALL I DO (IS DREAM OF YOU)
14. I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL
15. YOU'RE THE TOP
16. BOOKENDS

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45554 in Music
• Released on: 2003-08-26
• Number of discs: 1

Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2002
"...she has charm to burn, a smile that could give you hope in February and sings like nobody's business."

Jonathan Schwartz, National Public Radio
"... a stunning ascension of intuitive, intimate singing in a voice as singular as there currently is."

Humphrey Lyttelton, BBC Radio 2
"Everything about it, choice of songs ... the glorious voice, leaves one searching for a more superlative word than 'greatest' !'

Customer Reviews

Please come & sing in SoCal Soon, Stacey! ! ! !
This CD cements my total and committed adoration for Stacey Kent. The girl can' t go wrong. She can sing the side effects of a calcium channel blocker cardiac medication and I can bet she can still make you swoon. By now you probably have a couple of her CD's and that you know she is famous for updating classical music with romantic swing and precision, but do you know she can also sing comtemporary ones. Pay attention to an old James Taylor standard "You've Got A Friend" and how she sings the song like it was written for her. The acompaniment of Colin Oxley's guitar is so quite and sparse that it almost seems like Stacey is softly reading the lyrics. "You've Got a Friend" is difinetely the highlight of this Album. And it is amazing how she can turn a smaltzy song like Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now," into something pleadingly true. Overall all 16 tracks are great to listen to. It turns you pensive and makes you notice her lovely voice.

boy next door - stacey kent
As an admirer of and collector of Stacey Kent's CD's I did not think she could possibly outdo any of her previous recordings. However - I was wrong - her latest album supasses them all for perfection ofher slightly husky voice and choice of songs. "Say it isn't so" is gorgeous as are "The Trolley song" and "Too darned hot" (sorry Mel and Ella but this version is a strong contendere) and "Making Whoopee" which to me supasses many other recordings. I particularly enjoyed "Ooh.Shoo-be-doo-be" which I was not familiar with - a cute swinging number. I also considered "You've got a friend" -poignently and exquisitely done and a real winner!Well done Stacey - I hope I can get to see you live one day soon in Washington DC.

Stacey Kent - she's baaaack !
Ok, Stacey Kent fans, let's all fess up. I don't think she's really put a bad CD, or even a "good but not great" CD yet. But the last two, while good, often quite good, just didn't *quite* get the airplay on my player as maybe some of the earlier ones. Oh, "Dreamsville" had a few killer songs, but sometimes I felt there were a bunch that just didn't hit me. Her last attempt was pretty solid, but I don't always gravitate towards it when I reached for something to listen too...maybe because it was all from one composer (Richard Rodgers), who knows. It didn't help that around the same time Diana Krall did her live CD which I love either... that seemed to get more attention in my stack than Stacey's did, which isn't always the case.

I think, however, that "The Boy Next Door" is a landmark of sorts. She just seems, for lack of a better word, "arrived and confident". Her voice is in top, top form, with gorgeous phrasing, wonderful clarity, great feel, and finally, ever improving each time he took her to tape, Curtis Schwartz has recorded it dead on... the recording quality of this disk moves up into the upper echelon; the whole band and her voice integrate wonderfully. Way to go!

But I don't expect most of you pay much attention to that sort, so it's back to the music. I think she's hit on a really good collection of songs here, and while they aren't going to appeal to the lyric-content-meaning freaks who have to analyze what a song says, let's be honest, Stacey Kent is about the ephemeral delivery of the meaning and soul of the song, not about the literal content of the lyrics, and that's where nobody right now that I can think of (that sings) has her beat. She *nails* getting that so-hard-to-do "feel" right, and it's a large reason I have most everything she's done in my collection and keep going back to her.

Nitpicks? - One review mentioned the band doesn't get as much solo time as in others, and that is true. I would love a touch more of Dave Newton's wonderful Piano, but man, I'm nitpicking. The rest of the band is also in top form, complementing each piece wonderfully, with stellar playing more focused on quality and not, this time, on soloing. Newton digs down on organ on "Makin' Whoopee" which is a nice change-up from his stellar acoustic piano work, I'll also note.

Faves? There's probably 8 or 9 songs on here I really, really like, which is pretty good for me. But I gotta say.... her rendition of James Taylor's "You've got a friend" left me slack jawed. A great reading of a classic tune and played on something nice in terms of a playback system, it forces you to immediately stop what you're doing, forget whatever crap and tension you had in your day and spend a few minutes listening. Which, at the end of the proverbial day, this sort of music is all about.
Highly, Highly recommended.