Barbra Streisand on her pandemic project and her upcoming album,

Artist spent pandemic working on new album and her autobiography

Nobody commits to nostalgia like Barbra Streisand. Instead of obsessing over a sourdough bread recipe, binging a Netflix series or spending hours on Zoom meetings, the singer, songwriter, actor, director and philanthropist kept busy during the height of the pandemic doing research. On herself.

A new album called “Release Me 2,” available Aug. 6, had her plucking tracks from an unheard vault of her music spanning 1969 to 2020. That deep dive into her rare and unreleased recordings sent her into a creative déjà vu of sorts, one which had her back to one of her main loves: re-addressing and perfecting past performances.

“(‘Release Me 2’) was a chance to finally add the finishing touches to some of the songs that need them and it gave me a walk down memory lane,” Streisand says in a call from her home in Los Angeles. “It also gave me an opportunity to share work that still resonates with me deeply, regardless of when it was recorded.”

Jumping eras, genres and styles, “Release Me 2”’s track list moves from bubbly duets with Barry Gibb (“If Only You Were Mine,” released in 2005) to beautiful anthems (“One Day”) to more obscure cuts (“Rainbow Connection,” a bizarre duet with Kermit the Frog, written for 1979’s “The Muppet Movie”).

One would think that with Streisand’s standing, exploring locked away material would be someone else’s job. After all, she’s the only artist on the planet to achieve No. 1 albums in six consecutive decades, and the first woman and youngest person to win an Emmy, Tony, Grammy and Oscar. Yet, it is precisely Streisand’s persistent meticulousness, which is written about ad nauseam in almost every article about her, that pushes her to keep supervising every aspect of her legacy.

It’s the same drive that propelled her to have someone spray paint Oprah Winfrey’s microphones off-white — to match her own outfit, naturally — during a 2003 TV appearance, and install carpet in many of the concrete arenas she has performed in, simply for better acoustics. However extreme Streisand’s fastidiousness may be, she will not be shamed for her intense work ethic. “They were lying when they said the devil is in the details,” she says of her fascination with minutiae. “God is in the details.”

As a promising 20-something singer, she was just as specific and strategic when it came to her end goal of being a star. Streisand first cut her teeth on New York City’s nightclub circuit in the 1960s, armed with the kind of bygone era repertoire from the ’40s and ’50s she revered — material that many young singers wouldn’t dare touch. Cherrypicking through legendary Broadway standards and dusty cabaret favourites — which called for simpler times from forgotten decades — Streisand veered from the hip counterculture coffee house folk capturing the swingin’ zeitgeist. In the ’70s, Streisand bucked trends again. Amidst releasing Billboard-topping pop music on soundtracks to movies she starred in — box-office gold such as “The Way We Were” and “A Star Is Born” — she insisted on recording a full-blown album of arias called “Classical Barbra,” covering 16th- and 17th-century opera compositions.

Streisand’s foray into the past was also an intrinsic part of her first full-blown tour, beginning in 1993. She famously had a moment between songs where she re-enacted past sessions with her therapist onstage and discussed her former romantic relationships seconds before segueing into a video montage of her playing both psychologist and patient in movies such as 1987’s “Nuts” and 1991’s “The Prince of Tides.”

Yet none of these onstage and in-studio odes to her own yesteryears can be outmatched by Streisand’s live duet with herself — a peculiar high point in “The Concert” tour, spanning 1993 to 1994 — wherein the Brooklynborn multi-hyphenate belts “A Piece of Sky” directly to clips from her Oscar-nominated 1983 film “Yentl,” which Streisand starred in, directed, cowrote and co-produced. The footage of the then 52-year-old artist trying to outsing her 26year-old “Yentl” character onscreen personifies the advice she’s given to younger singers in interviews: “Study yourself. Your only competition should be you.”

Streisand’s powers of self-reflection are still very much front and centre throughout “Release Me 2,” which is far from a thrown-together collection of leftover tracks. In fact, Streisand pored over a handful of recordings for months and, once confirming a final track list, she began to refine her selection until meeting her own high standards.

“Although these are all my original vocals,” she says of the album’s 10 tracks, “it was important to mix the songs again and raise certain phrases in them that I felt are important, and I wanted to bring out instruments and change certain chord structures.” One of Streisand’s main concerns was finding a way to slightly retouch the tracks while maintaining the spirit in which they were originally sung.

For songs like “Sweet Forgiveness,” a sweeping ballad with lavish orchestration, Streisand had her hands in the weeds, tinkering and adjusting the song with a precise goal in mind that couldn’t be realized when it was first recorded. “We didn’t have budget or the time to record an infinite number of tracks. Decisions were made fast, and we’d have to take the best takes and mixes during a tight turnaround,” she says. “I like that analog has a warmer sound, you could hear surrounding noises, I wanted to keep that. Digital recordings often sound too clean, it’s unlike life, it’s too cold. I had to go along with the times eventually, but I fought it for a while and had many things recorded analog anyway.”

Hardcore Streisand fans, such as 44-year-old Toronto singer/ songwriter Sarah Slean, see new collections such as “Release Me 2” as vocal textbooks. “I have been a student of her voice ever since I heard her second greatest hits collection when I was 10 years old,” says Slean. “She was recording most of this well before we had AutoTune or all the manipulations that are possible now, ones that I freely use,” she says. “There’s something about her use of her pharyngeal space (the part of the throat behind the mouth and nasal cavity). She was a Glenn Gould-ian level of young genius — her voice was so huge and so elastic very early on and then, you can see it ripening over the recordings in collections likes these.” The Junonominated Slean add that no one has yet to usurp Streisand’s crown.

“Her voice transformed with maturity. When you hear Judy Garland, or even Frank Sinatra, give those huge, belting notes, you can tell all their muscles are so turned on,” she says. “Babs leans back and opens her mouth, and the fire hoses go on and you barely detect any kind of transition between the bottom of her range to the top; the high notes are rich and subtle and you do not sense effort at all. She is like a once-in-a-generation lucky genetic draw.”

That celebrated, smooth delivery admittedly comes from Streisand’s dramatic approach. While uncovering a forgotten gem titled “Living Without You,” an unused track written by Randy Newman for her “Stoney End” album of 1971, Streisand recalls her strategy. “I hadn’t heard that song in five decades, but I remember how I gave it the old Broadway way,” she says. “Everything makes sense to me as an actress when I’m singing. I saw a three-act play in a three-minute song. I bit into that song and had a character ready for it. (Producer) Walter Afanasieff and I came up with a new arrangement that served the lyric better.”

Other tracks, such as “Be Aware” — a studio version of a song she originally performed on a Burt Bacharach TV special in 1971 — speak to Streisand’s woke world view. Its lyrics directly tackle issues surrounding inequality and poverty.

Somewhere in the world, people are weak. Be aware, she sings.

While you speak your mind, others can’t speak. Be aware.

“That song sounds like we just recorded it because it is so relevant today,” she says. An avid news reader and tweeter who is unapologetically a Democrat and a staunch critic of many Republican policies, Streisand keeps abreast of current events with a philanthropic and a socio-political lens. She has donated massive amounts of money to UCLA’s Jewish and gender studies departments and recently made headlines by buying Disney stock for George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna Floyd. Her last studio album, “Walls,” was motivated by the 2016 presidential campaign. “Watching this very cruel person insulting women — especially Hillary Clinton — get elected … it crushed me,” she said in a Maclean’s interview in 2018. “My worst fears came true. It is my duty to offer my voice and my soul to this situation.”

Today, she views songs such as “Be Aware” as socio-political salves. “Music can resonate in ways that other artworks cannot.”

Streisand’s awareness can be traced to her first singing appearance, in 1960, in a gay club in Greenwich Village called the

“They were lying when they said the devil is in the details … God is in the details.” BARBRA STREISAND

Lion, where she won $50 in a talent competition for singing “A Sleepin’ Bee.” That song, plucked from a ’50s musical number written by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote, got her back into the club as a regular before she went on to sing at the legendary Bon Soir nightclub. It was around this time that Streisand met Barry Dennen, Bob Schulenberg and Terry Leong, three gay men who author and Hollywood historian William Mann says helped Streisand “realize herself.” Mann’s biography, “Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand,” chronicles Streisand’s relationship with the trio and her connection to a group of outcasts who would go on to support her career through its many shifts and phases.

“In 1960, a growing community of people who were identifying, as we would call them today, queer — gay men, lesbians, trans and non-binary people — and forming a subculture that Barbra walked right into and soaked up,” Mann says from his home in Provincetown, Mass. “Just like them, Streisand had to fight to get noticed and was also told she can’t succeed. She was told because she looks too Jewish and because the stars at the time were all conventional white bread, Christian, cookie cutter, Hollywood-produced celebrities. Queer people responded to her because she was not playing by those rules.

“Barry was teaching her to believe in herself and gave her the work of Mabel Mercer, whom she studied, and he ended up introducing her to other artists like Judy Garland,” Mann says. “Bob brought her to vintage clothing shops and worked closely with her on costumes and cultivating her look, and Terry was teaching her about how to tie that all together to create personas.”

Those formative years are seen by Streisand as a flurry of learning curves and hard knocks.

“It was the early days of building up an act,” Streisand says. “Barry was my roommate and brought me to the Lion to sing. Since I had no job and no money, Terry Leong could make the designs I drew. Bob was the artist and he would always draw my face. He was the only one, in a sense, who thought I was so beautiful when other people were calling me kooky and strange-looking or oddlooking. The way he drew and shadowed my face is what taught me how to put on makeup.”

Streisand shares even more of her connection to the underground in a forthcoming book, set for release by 2022. “Because of the quarantine for COVID, I was able to finish a lot of chapters for my autobiography, which talks about my first eight years performing,” she says. “I actually got through to writing right up to my marriage with Jim (actor James Brolin, with whom the artist has been partnered for 25 years). The next 23 years are going to be in an epilogue because I didn’t even work as much.”

Streisand says she will be truthful about what she’s experienced as a woman in an industry where the male gaze was prevalent, and being heard as someone viable and valuable was a constant struggle. “You never stop fighting,” she says. “I always thought like a director, even from my first show, ‘I Can Get it for You Wholesale,’” she says of her first foray onto Broadway.

“I was so fortunate when I was doing ‘Funny Girl.’ I had two exquisite men in my life there: William Wyler and Harry Stradling, the director and the cameraman. The cameraman had photographed Marlene Dietrich and all those lady stars. I’d say, ‘I think the camera should go up two inches. What do you think, Harry? What do you think if we do a shot from above and I’m all in shadow?’ He was so open and loved to experiment. I wasn’t demeaned by those two men. By my next movie, ‘Hello, Dolly!’ it was a total boy’s club. Walter Matthau and Gene Kelly, who I loved as a teenager … they didn’t want to know my ideas and shut me out.”

The double standard is something that still concerns Streisand greatly. When the topic of obliterating the male and female categories at the Oscars is brought up, Streisand immediately gets her assistant to google a speech she made at the 1993 Academy Awards. “I’ve been saying this all along,” she says before quoting herself: “I look forward to the time when tributes like this will no longer be necessary. It won’t be necessary because women will have the same opportunities as men in all fields and will be honoured without regard for gender but simply for the excellence of their work.”

Streisand also brings up another speech she made at an event called Women in Film. “Can you believe in 1992 I said, ‘A man is assertive, but a woman is aggressive. A man is commanding, but a woman is demanding. A man is uncompromising and a woman is a ballbreaker. A man is a perfectionist, but a woman is a pain in the ass.’ How many years ago was that?”

Although Streisand has made an art of revisiting and revising the past, she is very much living in the present. She had a brief false start with a major project in 2012, namely a film she was intent on directing about the life and times of Margaret Bourke-White, the first foreign photographer to take pictures of Soviet labourers in 1929. “I still want to do this film at some point … I had Cate Blanchett and Colin Firth already cast!”

Streisand says in an exasperated tone. When prodded for more details, she stops herself mid-sentence. “Can you believe it? Wait until you hear the truth about this one. I’ll write about it in my book.”

The disappointing setback, however, hasn’t stopped her from diving into new projects. For example, she is co-executive producing an upcoming TV series about Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister to date. Based on “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel,” a non-fiction book by Francine Klagsbrun, and written by Emmy-award-winning “Handmaid’s Tale” alum Eric Tuchman, the production stars “Unorthodox” lead Shira Haas.

Tight-lipped on whether she will hop into the director’s seat for one of the episodes, Streisand offers this apropos answer before being whisked off for her next interview: “Any time I can support a great woman who’s succeeded in a man’s world, I’m all for that.”