John Barrowman's Another Side

John's new CD premiered about a week ago in the UK. You can get it on Amazon, but be prepared to pay for it. Possibly with severed limbs and kidneys.

That said, the CD is good. Really good. Especially if you like to sing along. John sings really well and I'm not sure if he was going for a theme here, or what, but I swear it's almost every song we've all ever sung in the car or shower. And in the case of "All By Myself" sung badly.

If it was titled "John Barrowman's Ultimate Sing Along" it wouldn't be inaccurate.

First, we have "All out of Love", which he manages to sound very sweet in. Then "You're so Vain" which I saw on the youtube clip when he was on the National Lottery. I like it a lot better on the CD, because the video dancers in the background were way out of sync and the studio recording sounds so much better. I have nothing to say about "She's Always a Woman to Me" and "Your Song". "Time After Time" sounds completely different from every other cover of the song I've ever heard, which I have to give him major kudos for. "Everything She Does is Magic" is preposterously good. I've almost started singing along in public in time with my iPod, and I'm going to pretend I didn't do some goofy footwork dance move on the stairs. Thankfully no one was watching. But John can dance too! He sang the song on Strictly Come Dancing the other night, which I think is sort of like Dancing with the Stars. "If You Leave Me Now" is cute, and very seventies sounding. And "Heaven" (which it took me a moment to recognize, since it sounds similar to his cover of "Time After Time") startled me. It was one of those club anthems a few years ago, when it seemed a new remix of it was playing on the radio at least once a week. Part of me wants a techno remix of his version, honestly.

However, prize of the whole album is his cover of Nina Simone's "Feeling Good". I had to listen to Nina sing it this morning and Michael Buble too, to catch everything about it. "Feeling Good" is one of those songs I don't think I've ever heard covered well enough that I thought it stood up in awesomeness next to the original. I've never watched Six Feet Under but I love their commercial featuring the song. Makes me wish I could skate. Nina is a hard one to top, simply because I think she's so incredibly sultry at it, and it's a sultry song. Even the background music sounds sultry. It's perfect. And that makes all the covers automatically fail somehow. Michael Buble sounds like too much of a good boy to really carry it off, even if the instruments seem to get it more than he does in some places. Up until the first "And I'm Feeling Good" he sounds like he has no business singing it, and then all the sudden the trumpets start up and he suddenly sounds like the cat that got the canary. Unfortunately by the time he's almost about to sing that line again, he's back to good. The trumpets carry the rest of the song, really, and I know I'm nitpicking about his tone; he does a good job with it regardless, especially at the end when he gets passionate sounding and his voice frays.

John starts the song off sounding lovelorn, which is brilliant. And by the time he's gotten to the first "good" he's worked himself into a raspy tone. He doesn't sound as sultry as Nina, but I've pretty much given up on anyone ever matching her in that category. He sounds really, really good, and I don't know much about acoustics but it sounds like where-ever he's singing is big and empty because there's a slight echo of his voice. Somehow that really works. He ends it well too; he carries "feeling" only slightly longer than I can, and spends the last minute of the song rasping the lines in a very sultry way. What I was disappointed by was the band the put him with. There's not one trumpet. A lot of strings, which do this clever shivery thing, and some cellos, and a piano. No trumpets.

Now, if someone out there had clever music software and could put John's voice with Michael's background music, then we might have a real challenger to the awesomeness of Nina.

On a non-musical note, his cover picture is to die for.