Singing the old standards

I've ranted on about how I hate Rod Stewart's American Songbook albums, but I suppose that doesn't mean that other people can't do them and do them well.

I was going through CDs and I found the Red Hot And Blue compilation, which might as well been the companion CD to the De-Lovely Soundtrack. Where the movie soundtrack tends to have the performers doing the songs as they were originally intended to be performed, the Red Hot & Blue compilation gives the songs a modern twist. (At least modern as of the 90's)

I suppose the main difference between the two CDs would be that the Red Hot & Blue disc was primary European artists like Jimmy Somerville, Erasure, U2 and Aztec Camera. Not that De-Lovely didn't sport just as many famous European singers, but the soundtrack had far more mainstream hit makers.

Robbie Williams did the the film's title number phenomenally well, but he did his own album of standards not long ago. Robbie could fit in well with the Rat Packers, in my opinion. Elvis Costello could too. I loved his version of Let's Misbehave and his earlier rendition of Love For Sale. But Elvis has been known to do justice to the strangest songs. His contribution to the Gershwin Tribute, But Not For Me was beautiful as is his version of Kurt Weill's Lost In The Stars. (That song makes me swoon)

So why then don't more people that can sing do albums of old standards? Perhaps because we like to torture our ears with people like Rod Stewart's versions. (Not to say that they all are bad, because I've heard one or two that I liked)

Of course if we want to hear good versions of these old songs, we can always buy albums by Diana Krall, Tierney Sutton, Harry Connick Jr or Michael Feinstein, but that would guarantee the album to be good, and there would be no surprises involved when you discovered that you liked the sound.

But hell, I'll take what I can get. I wonder if I could convince Justin and John to record Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot.