Album Release Date: November 9, 2018 |
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From the liner notes by Kenneth Jones:
“I love the album's goals and execution, and how it picks up on PS Classics' heritage and legacy. How fitting is it that they should be the ones to remold the Great American Songbook as they do here, so that a century of American popular song speaks to LGBTQ audiences in a way it never quite has. As always, their approach is earnest, loving, detailed and altogether winning.
In some ways, every PS Classics album plays a bit like a cast album, and that's especially true of Philip's Will He Like Me? Tommy and Philip call it a song-cycle, but it feels to me like a cast album. Philip is quite wonderful on this; you feel the serious progression that he is a boy at the top of the album and very much a man with history at the end. The arrangements and orchestrations are full of delicacy and feeling. Songs are paired imaginatively and evocatively — as when the recollection of a first date ('It's a Nice Face') blends into a reverie of a shared future ('Mr. Snow'). And the final three numbers are simply heartbreaking. Philip's fifth solo album is as rich as it is satisfying, as provocative as it is enjoyable. It's an album to savor.” |
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Philip Chaffin
WILL HE LIKE ME?
(a love story)
PS Classics co-founder Philip Chaffin – joined by his husband and producer Tommy Krasker – reimagines the Great American Songbook for the post-marriage-equality era. Will He Like Me? weaves together nearly a century of American popular song to tell a gay man's love story: one that takes him from first date to final farewell. It reinvents 17 classic songs for the LGBTQ community by capturing them in a way they wouldn't – and couldn't – have been sung just a decade ago. The impulse is novel, but the resulting song-cycle reveals, once again, the true glory of the Great American Songbook: how it speaks to us all, evoking shared emotions and experiences that cut across gender, class, race and orientation. The song list ranges from forgotten gems ("Who Gave You Permission?" from the made-for-TV movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom; the title tune from the 1966 off-Broadway musical Man With a Load of Mischief) to much-loved standards that male vocalists, until recently, haven't been able to sing (Rodgers & Hammerstein's "When I Marry Mister Snow," the Jerome Moross-John Latouche evergreen "Windflowers"). For his fifth album, Chaffin explores the bittersweet experience of searching for love over the course of a lifetime, and finding it, and his rich baritone captures every nuance of emotion, as he reconceives the songs of a previous era for the lovers of a new one.
http://www.philipchaffin.com/
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- Will He Like Me?
- It's a Nice Face / When I Marry Mister Snow
- Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love
- I Didn't Know What Time It Was
- Man With a Load of Mischief
- Charity's Soliloquy
- An Occasional Man
- Lovely, Lonely Man
- A Tender Spot / Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe
- Tom
- But I Could Cook
- I Got Lost in His Arms / Don't Ever Leave Me
- Who Gave You Permission?
- Windflowers
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