Ray Price, "Beauty Is . " (AmeriMonte)
The late Ray Price titled his final studio recording "Beauty Is ."after an opening duet with Vince Gill that draws on the axiom about the eye of the beholder. Music is similarly subjective, but it would be hard to imagine anyone not recognizing the sublime beauty of the late Ray Price's singing: He owned one of the richest voices and most emotionally expressive styles in country music history.
Price died in December, and when he entered the studio earlier in 2013 with producer Fred Foster, he realized "Beauty Is. " quite likely would be his last. At age 87, he had spent a couple of years battling cancer and other ailments. Live, and on record, Price's voice had remained a remarkable instrument, yet there are moments on "Beauty Is ." where age, for the first time, appears to limit his breath and range.
But Foster arranges these love songs to capitalize on the tonal quality of Price's voice. Set to string orchestrations accented by country instrumentation, Price sounds like a wise sage with a big heart and a gentle soul on touching songs such as Willie Nelson's "It Always Will Be," a romantic duet with Martina McBride on the standard "An Affair To Remember" and a second duet with Gill on the lovely "Until Then."
Graceful to the end, Price takes a final bow with an elegant collection that nicely caps a great musical legacy.
omR clp??7?3;mso-fareast-language:EN-GB'>"This isn't a Kiss book. This is really a book about my life. I was steadfastly against the idea of doing it for decades, because the great George Orwell once said that the autobiography is the most outrageous form of fiction," Stanley said. "But I realized it could be inspiring to people."
Stanley wants to show people that despite having the deck stacked against them, it's possible to overcome adversity. But it took him a long time to do so.
"I was an angry, dysfunctional kid with a real image problem and a hearing problem that put me under constant scrutiny," Stanley said. "Growing my hair was the start of covering it up."
Stanley says stardom and wealth only masked the problem, and it wasn't until realized that the key to his own happiness was through family and friends.
Along the way, he also found a calling in a different type of stage performance when he appeared in the Toronto production of "The Phantom of the Opera" in 1999.
Despite his long career in one of music's hardest rocking bands, Stanley said hismusical appreciation always covered a lot of ground, including being an ardent fan ofmusical theater.
"I grew up with a greater appreciation of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Sondheim," Stanley said. But he regards the composer of "Phantom of the Opera" above them all.
"Andrew Lloyd Webber is actually more than rock. He's much closer to, I believe, Puccini and Verdi. Some music snobs would take issue with that, but that's why we're not on the same wavelength," Stanley said.
Stanley regards his stint as the Phantom as a turning point in his career. After seeing the London company perform the show in 1988, he said it changed his life.
"I had this momentary revelation, an epiphany where I went, 'Wow, I can do that,'" he said. "And it was the same thing I did when I saw the Beatles. I was a fat little kid who couldn't play an instrument but I looked at them and said, 'I can do that.'"
Eleven years later, Stanley got a call from his agent asking if he'd be interested in auditioning for the part of the Phantom and got to play him with the Toronto company, what he calls "the hardest work I've ever done." When that ended, he went back to concentrating on his highly successful band, but gained an even greater appreciation for the art form.
After the experience of performing eight shows a week, Stanley had this to say: "Anybody in rock 'n' roll who actually complains about the discipline and the workload should actually be flipping burgers because we have a lucky, lucky life."