“At this point in my life it’s kind of cool that I don’t
have to ask anybody’s permission anymore about what I want to sing.” – Oleta
Adams
Iconic, Grammy-award
nominated vocalist Oleta Adams celebrates her 45th year in the music industry
with a new collection of classic songs entitled Third Set. Inspired by the early
days of her career, when she played multiple shows nightly in lounges and piano
bars across the globe, Third Set highlights the music that Adams and her band
always loved to play during that halcyon hour when the evening’s final set
arrived.
“Before my break, I was playing in the clubs for 17 years,”
Adams recalls. “I played a lot of hotel gigs where we would have to cater to
all kinds of people. In the first two sets of the night, we didn’t know who we
were catering to, so we had to do the songs that were the most familiar. But
then, after a while, the third set became the one I designated as my set or the
musician’s set. It was when we played what we wanted to play. I grew very fond
of that set because it was in that third set that the greatest amount of
creativity happened – when the crowds were smaller and we were under less
pressure to do what the crowd wanted.”
Though Third Set may be comprised of the music that Adams
and her band revel in playing for themselves, it is likewise filled with
stunning arrangements of all-time favorite songs that music lovers will also no
doubt stand up and applaud in much the same way that audiences have done as the
velvety-voiced songstress has worked out the songs on the road over the last
year.
Included on Third Set are “Oleta-fied’ versions of
everything from jazz standards like Frank Sinatra’s, “Only The Lonely”, a
haunting and desolate meditation on the despair of loneliness, and Cole
Porter’s “It’s Alright With Me”, which Adams refreshingly interprets with sassy,
sultry resolve, to an anthemic new take on Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”
and a soul-stirring reimagining of Joni Mitchell’s folk rock masterpiece “Don’t
Interrupt the Sorrow”, which becomes a soaring musical deliberation on the
eternal war between the sexes in Adams’ capable hands.
Of her song choices, Adams explains that, “These are not
necessarily songs that people would have thought I would choose but I chose
songs that have meaning.”
“At this point in my life, it’s kind of cool that I don’t
have to ask anybody’s permission anymore about what I want to sing,” she
continues.
An elegant remake of Joni Mitchell’s “River’, a bluesy
revision of Nina Simone’s “Do I Move You”, acoustic revisitations of her own
recordings, “Evolution” and “Rhythm of Life”, as well as two new uplifting
contemporary gospel tracks “Wilted Roses” and “His Loving Eyes”, round out
Adams’ latest offering.
“It needs to have a great lyric and I have to relate to it
in some way,” the songbird says of the songs that attract her. “I’ve found that
pain is pain, it doesn’t matter who’s feeling it. When people are lonely and
hurt or even when they’re happy I can’t imagine that it is any different for
one than it is for another. Whether it’s me or somebody I know and I’m speaking
for them, there has to be something in a song that I feel enough people can
relate to. “
And relate they undoubtedly shall.
No comments:
Post a Comment