memoirs
Barbra Streisand looks back on her life – and doesn’t leave anything out
The way she was: Barbra Streisand, at a concert in San Francisco in 1976
© Tony Korody/Polaris
An autobiography and two new albums: It’s “Streisand Weeks”, the singer and actress is rummaging through her memories. Our author read and listened.
Before we get to the topic, let’s talk briefly about the debate. The woman is called Streisand spoken with a soft “s” and his first name Barbra with two “a” and not three. This is important because she takes this very seriously. She is said to have already complained to Apple because its voice assistant Siri supposedly pronounced “Streisand” and something was going on. The company’s boss, Tim Cook, immediately apologized and assured that Siri would be reprogrammed, it is said.
So is Streisand a diva? Rather, someone who takes everything very carefully. The fish in her garden pond in Malibu, for example, have the same two colors as the red and white barn at the edge of the pond; That was important to her, otherwise it would hurt the view. It’s a problem with her look anyway. In 2003, she sued a photographer for millions of dollars in damages because the man had taken thousands of aerial photos of the California coast and her house was visible in one of the images. Even the photographer didn’t know that, but because of the lawsuit she lost, the whole world knew it. Since then, sociology has spoken of the “Streisand effect,” which describes what happens when you believe you can put out a candle with a bucket of gasoline.
Barbra Streisand has already released 34 albums
Gorgeous, Streisand: actress, global star, Oscar winner, singer. She has released 34 albums with songs like “Woman in Love”, “The Way We Were” and “Memory”, wonderful, somewhat old-fashioned sighing hymns.
Streisand’s voice has a unique timbre of pride, defiance and vulnerability, which wraps itself around the mind in its elegiac sound, as if the songs were a kind of music for one’s own life film. One can also consider this type of music to be weak – but no other white singer has found this secret route into the soul like Barbra Streisand.
Now, at 81, Barbra Streisand felt she could put her long life to paper. And because she was already browsing through the memories, “Evergreens” was added, an album with what she considers to be the 22 best songs from 60 years on her Capitol Records label. An album with songs from her 1983 film “Yentl” has also just been released.
Barbra Streisand’s biography is being published these days
So it’s Streisand weeks. “My Name is Barbra”, the title of her biography, is published in the USA, and because the daughter of a Jewish family from Brooklyn takes everything very carefully, the book has almost 1000 pages; Nothing should be left unmentioned. In it she also describes her strange preference for spending time at the dentist. And we find out what she likes so much about her husband James Brolin: In addition to the fact that he comes to all of her concerts and is never bored, he also has very nice teeth.
The fact that the politically active Democrat Streisand has many Republicans in the audience other than her husband at her concerts can be explained by the fact that only they can afford the high ticket prices, the “New Yorker” recently mocked. Since it is still unclear when “My Name is Barbra” will be released in German, you can only hear her albums here during the festival weeks.
Barbra Streisand didn’t want to reinvent herself with “evergreens.”
Anyone who thinks, oh nice, all their best songs again will be disappointed and surprised at the same time. Because the aforementioned “The Way We Were” and “Memory” are not included. The 22 songs are a kind of personal selection from Madame S., all of which were on her albums, but never in this compilation. Which leads to a varied experience. If in early songs like “Absent Minded Me” and “The Shadow of Your Smile” you can still feel her past as a nightclub singer who throws longings around with her voice and who, for example in “Tomorrow”, has real crooner qualities, other songs can be heard like “Two People” and the classic “Moon River” become increasingly accentless – they fade away in the violin fog.
It all sounds as if someone is singing around his monument but isn’t bringing anything from the past into the present. Streisand certainly didn’t want to reinvent herself or discover completely different sides to her music as she got older with “Evergreens”. She would have the strength, the voice and, above all, the self-confidence to do it. Just as she can’t let go of the idea of filming a sequel to her big Hollywood success “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford. The fact that Redford is perhaps too old at 87 is not the problem, she just explained. Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones, was made to look young again using digital technology.
She wants to call Robert.