Both Sides Now. Michael Feinstein. 1990. Elektra.

I had to mature into my admiration for Michael Feinstein’s singing gifts. At Sound Warehouse, we stocked Feinstein’s catalog in the Easy Listening section, enough for me to disqualify him from fair consideration as serious pop artist. Easy Listening recording artists adhered too closely to the genre’s conventions, without any sense of creative risk, for them to be of any interest. What my bias caused me to miss was a vocalist with such a thorough understanding of the Great American Songbook that his renditions of standards owe as much to the influence of the legendary pop interpreters of the last century—Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, et al—as they do to Original Cast Album orthodoxy. Covering Joni Mitchell’s best known, beloved song of self-discovery, Feinstein does not meddle with the song’s emotional points, plotting them instead along those same recognizable paths where they’ve played in our memory for all these years. Feinstein’s orchestral arrangement is rich with the uncomplicated, familiar textures of commercialized veneration; the artist who’s celebrated songwriters from the Gershwins and Jule Styne to Jimmy Webb and Andre Previn knows the complexities of pop traditions well, his impeccable artistic instincts taking us as far into his tribute to Mitchell as good taste will allow. Mitchell and her musical peers romanticized postwar American youth with such personal, far reaching visionary acumen that from their canon a musical ethos emerged, settling itself into the States’ mythological history, and it’s from this generational catalyst that Feinstein seizes and refashions core truths to speak once more on behalf of a new generation. Feinstein was only thirty-four years old when he recorded the verse, “Tears and fears and feeling proud/To say ‘I love you,’ right out loud,” and it would be another quarter of a century before the landmark Supreme Court decision Obergefell v Hodges legalized marriage equality. Feinstein was married in 2008. One can only imagine what lyrics played in his head as he celebrated an occasion so many had been dubious of living long enough to see actually happen. 

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