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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 6:53:09 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 6:56:56 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 6:58:38 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 7:01:41 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 7:17:26 GMT -5
Dig! Interviews ‘HIGH DRAMA’: “THE BRIEF WAS TO REMOULD THESE GREAT SONGS” SAYS ADAM LAMBERT
An eclectic treat, ‘High Drama’, the fifth solo album from Queen frontman Adam Lambert, takes the art of reinterpretation to a new level.When it comes to reinterpreting songs, few contemporary performers can hold a candle to Adam Lambert. The flamboyant, Indiana-born, California-raised vocalist first wowed the wider public in the 2009 final of American Idol, and he’s since proved he’s one of the world’s best curators of other artist’s songs. Lambert has shown this rare skill in his role fronting Queen since 2011, but it was his delicate reading of Cher’s Believe, at the 2018 Kennedy Center Honours in New York City, that inspired him to record High Drama: his first fully-fledged covers album.“I got great feedback when I covered Believe, and I approached the song in a way that was very different from the original,” Lambert tells Dig! “But even when I was doing American Idol, thinking of ways to bring a fresh slant on really well-known songs was always paramount in my mind. So when the idea came up for me to do a covers album, I thought, Well, why not?”“THIS RECORD WAS VERY MUCH A COLLABORATION”Bearing in mind Lambert’s talent for reinterpretation, it seems only natural that he would record a covers album at some stage. His post-American Idol solo career has yielded four solo albums of freshly-penned material, so you might wonder why it’s taken him so long. Then again, the collaborative process that led to Lambert co-writing previous hits such as Whataya Want From Me and Sleepwalker with the likes of PInk, Max Martin and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder provided the blueprint for the High Drama sessions.“This record was very much a collaboration,” Lambert says. “I got a list of songs from my team and my label, and we narrowed them down. I worked with producers and musicians, including George Moore (Clean Bandit), Andrew Wells (Halsey) and Tommy English (Kacey Musgraves), but I was heavily involved in the whole process. Not just in terms of pitching individual songs, but also coming up with ideas for how to transform them. That was a really creative process and very enjoyable.”Such is the quality of High Drama that it sells the record short to describe it as merely a “covers” album. The tracklist casts its net wide, snagging a selection of tried and tested classics from the past six decades, but also showcasing radically reworked material from contemporary artists whose stars are very much in the ascendence. A song from one of these young firebrands, Billie Eilish’s Getting Older, provided the spark that set the High Drama sessions alight.“It just struck me that it’s such a clever way to talk about growing up,” Lambert says of the song, which – in its original form – opens Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever. “I found it really interesting that she’s only 19, yet with that song, she’s perfectly captured the feeling of what it means to grow up. She’s totally done her own thing, and I admire the fact she dares to be different. Her spirit really appeals to me.”“‘HIGH DRAMA’ HAD TO LIVE UP TO ITS TITLE”Lambert lush’s Beatles-esque reinvention of Eilish’s relatively stark original is typical of the radical sonic reinventions to be found on High Drama. Yet, while many of the songs’ arrangements are fresh and startling, some of the artists Lambert salutes on the record provided inspiration for him while he, too, grew up in public. These days, he can genuinely call one of them, New Romantic icon Boy George, a personal friend, though he feels the Culture Club frontman remains an underrated figure in pop music.
“I remember seeing George for the first time on a re-run of a talk show he did in the US in the early 80s,” Lambert recalls. “I guess I saw it when I was in high school, and I was just blown away by how bold and matter-of-fact he was about who he was as a gay man.
“I don’t really think enough people give him credit for being such a groundbreaking figure,” Lambert continues. “When I was thinking of artists to cover for the new record, Boy George’s name came up, and I thought it would a really nice thing to take on one of his songs. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? helped establish George in the mainstream, and the original has this amazing reggae groove, but I didn’t want to touch that. Instead, we made it sound kinda sad and much darker. The album is called High Drama, after all, so we needed to live up to the title!”
Now recognised as one of the most pioneering LGBTQ+ musicians of his generation, Lambert’s take on Culture Club’s breakthrough hit is striking – and so is his reinterpretation of High Drama’s oldest song, Mad About The Boy. Written by actor and playwright Noël Coward, and first performed in the 1932 revue Words And Music, the song has since become part of the pop-culture firmament thanks to covers by artists as diverse as Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt and Marianne Faithfull.
Coming on like an orchestral torch song with more than a touch of 90s trip-hop stars Portishead, Lambert’s own take on Mad About The Boy is performed with feeling, and it sits well in such august company. He’s already premiered it in public, having performed the song live on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing (an event he recalls as “a great experience and very well-received”), and his version Mad About The Boy is also the title song for the new Noël Coward documentary, directed by Barnaby Thompson and scheduled for release later this year.
More + videos: www.thisisdig.com/feature/high-drama-adam-lambert-album-interview/
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 7:18:32 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 7:39:18 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 7:43:25 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 8:14:36 GMT -5
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Post by pi on Feb 23, 2023 12:08:28 GMT -5
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