Have yourself a merry little Xmas, Mr. Martin
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - 1 Comment
The 96-year-old composer of the classic holiday song talks about his life
Bettman; Everett Collection; Istock; Getty Images; Illustration by Taylor Shute
“One of the things I’m most grateful for is that God gave me a variety of gifts,” says Hugh Martin, the 96-year-old composer-lyricist who also built parallel careers as a vocal arranger, accompanist and singer. But the cover of Martin’s new autobiography, The Boy Next Door, emphasizes the thing he’s best known for: it mentions that he’s “the composer of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Martin told Maclean’s that he didn’t expect that song to be the biggest part of his more than 70 years in show business: “I only wrote it because there was a spot in the movie [Meet Me in St. Louis] that called for a Christmas song.” For many years, it was less popular than another song from the same film, The Trolley Song, and then suddenly, “a lot of people began to do it about the same time. I never found out who started it.”
There’s much more to Martin’s career than one Christmas song, though, and one of the purposes of the book is to remind us that he wrote music and lyrics for pop standards and jazz favourites alike, both alone and with collaborators like his former singing partner Ralph Blane. The book touches on the origins of his best songs, including Pass That Peace Pipe, which has been covered by Bing Crosby and even the Muppets, and the campy cult classic An Occasional Man, inspired by a phrase he heard from a maid in his native Alabama. Cabaret entertainer Michael Feinstein, who has performed and recorded many of Martin’s songs, told Maclean’s that he considers Martin “one of the most inspired songwriters of his generation,” and Stephen Sondheim put four of Martin’s songs on a list of 100 songs he wishes he’d written himself.
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Maclean's Interview: k.d. lang
By Kate Fillion - Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 12:23 AM - 11 Comments
The crooner talks about being in debt, pro football, walking away from fame, and why many of her songs ‘aren’t that good’
Singer-songwriter k.d. lang’s new four-disc career retrospective, Recollection, includes hits and rare live recordings. The one-time poster girl for lesbian chic, whose voice her sometime duet partner Tony Bennett considers “immortal,” is now a Tibetan Buddhist. The four-time Grammy and eight-time Juno Award winner lives in Los Angeles with her partner of eight years. -
The secret to Susan Boyle’s success
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 313 Comments
Other reality stars (think Adam Lambert, Kris Allen) try to be originals. Boyle knows better.
Is Susan Boyle about to cross over from reality star to singing star? The 48-year-old Scottish woman, who surprised Simon Cowell earlier this year with her powerful singing voice on Britain’s Got Talent (and then lost the competition), is one of many reality-show contestants to release an album. But I Dreamed a Dream, her debut CD, is performing at a level that goes beyond the usual TV tie-in. According to Billboard, the recording sold 701,000 copies in its first week in the U.S. alone, “the best opening week for a female artist’s debut album” since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking album sales in 1991. She’s just as popular in Canada, though she doesn’t exactly love us back, having twice cancelled plans to visit here. No matter where she goes or doesn’t go, she’s the most popular recording star produced by Cowell’s Talent and Idol TV franchises. And not just because of her famously dumpy appearance, or the publicity she got for a recent bout of exhaustion. She’s the first reality contestant whose CDs have unlimited appeal to reality TV viewers.
Not that Boyle is the first reality star with a hit album; Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, among others, came before her. She isn’t even the first successful loser: Adam Lambert is famous for finishing second, while Jennifer Hudson recently got the ultimate mark of star status, her own Christmas special. But none of them have achieved the success of I Dreamed a Dream. Lambert’s debut album hit Billboard’s chart with 198,000 copies—a good figure but not in Boyle’s league; the man who beat him, Kris Allen, couldn’t crack the top 10. Critic Ryan White pointed out in the Oregonian that Cowell’s shows are a launching pad for older songwriters “looking to get their music back out to a broader audience,” and no one cares about most of the people who sing those songs. But the wide audience that watched Boyle’s Talent debut on YouTube is actually buying her CD; they wouldn’t buy Lambert’s or Allen’s.
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Cindy Gomez’s Cinderella story
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 2 Comments
She used to sell office furniture in Toronto. Now she’s a Nokia-branded singing, dancing global superstar.
Cindy Gomez is in motion, cruising along Los Angeles’ chi-chi Melrose Avenue in late August in the back of a big black chauffeured SUV. The Canadian singer is travelling with Dave Stewart, who came to fame as the bespectacled guy next to Annie Lennox in the innovative ’80s band the Eurythmics. Today, the 57-year-old British rock legend is a big-picture entrepreneur—performer, songwriter, producer, photographer, activist, new media savant and general connector of cosmic dots.All of these endeavours dovetail perfectly with his current quest: to turn the multilingual Gomez, with her United Colours of Benetton beauty, into a global, multi-platform superstar. That in itself isn’t the kind of visionary thinking for which Stewart, a Davos denizen, corporate consultant on “disruptive change,” and friend of Bono, is known. What makes it pioneering is that he’s doing it in tandem with US$70-billion Finnish cellphone colossus Nokia as part of that company’s quest to become the world’s biggest entertainment media network. The stakes are big, Stewart says in his soft-spoken, unassuming, sage-like way: “If the experiment works, it will change the way art is made.” Continue…
