BMG Rights Management
Pop, 2022
Oh look, Luke Evans is back with another collection of music!
A Song for You follows the formula of his previous album At Last: cover versions, baby. Well, mostly. Only this time, the selection of songs is giving very wine mom drunk by ten in the morning realness.
There’s Come What May, from Moulin Rouge, this time re-imagined as a duet with Charlotte Church. I’m far more curious about whether her recent stint in The Masked Singer UK will see her coming back into warble land, than I am intrigued by this song. This is because the song is trite and predictable, like a show-off before a karaoke box way.
Don’t worry, Nicole Kidman may have been displaced from Come What May, but she’s on Say Something, originally by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera. Mr Evans belts like an earnest theater kid, wringing out all semblance of nuance and subtlety from the song, and the less said about Ms Kidman’s vocals, the better. I like the original for about a month, before it gets played to death on the radio, so it kills me hard and painfully to listen to this one.
Mr Evans’s foray into putting the most exaggerated pained theatrical treatment to overplayed, tired songs that have been covered dead beyond dead continues with Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water, U2’s Everybody Hurts, Frank Sinatra’s My Way, Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me…
What is this? The recordings of some contestant from American Idol or The Voice? It is as if Mr Evans had taken a look at the list of cleared songs from those shows and said to himself, “I’ll do this one, that one, this one too…”
The only moments when I don’t feel like I’m being sucked down an abyss of boredom are when he launches into the old Welsh hymn Calon Lân—his bombastic vocal theatrics actually give his performance a lovely “We’re going to war on Christmas Day and it’d be glorious!” feel to it—and in the two original songs, Horizons Blue and Busy Breaking Yours.
The latter work because he’s actually performing in a more relaxed and natural manner, thus giving the song a sense of sincerity and even poignancy that is lacking in the rest of the album. However, the two songs are not very memorable on their own right, and the chorus of Horizons Blue is embarrassingly cheesy.
The photo on my fridge
Just one look and gets me through
My favorite song it plays to see your face
Our heart is blue
What the hell is that? Has someone let Richard Marx out of the cellar? Put him back there!
On the whole, the selection of songs is key to making or breaking an album of cover versions. Sure, there are two original songs here, whoop-bee-doo, but on the whole, the choice of the songs here makes me instinctively recoil because they have been covered to death by everyone and anyone that has ever stood before a microphone.
Seriously, of all the one Christmas carol that he could have chosen to include here, it has to be freaking Silent Night. What, is that the only carol that he knows of?
The previous album has a better balance of done-to-death and my-what-a-surprise choice of songs. This one, on the other hand, feels like an effort to pander to people that can’t get enough of another rendition of Wham’s Last Christmas or Judy Garland’s Over the Rainbow.
That or Mr Evans has a far lousier taste in music than I suspected. Hmm, we may have to rethink our imaginary torrid love affair, if that were the case…
