Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan met for the first time recording ‘The Very Thought of You’ for her latest album. Photo by Getty Images
On paper they seem an unlikely vocal duo. Some might even call them “Beauty and the Beast.” Yet when Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan join forces to sing the Ray Noble standard “The Very Thought of You” on Streisand’s brand-new duets album, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, the two venerable singers, both 60-plus years into their careers, complement each other gorgeously in a mature and authoritative statement of love.
The track opens with the sound of harmonica, a sound often associated with Dylan, whose early albums and concerts in the 1960s and into the ‘70s often featured the Nobel Prize-winning rock poet accompanying himself on both guitar and harmonica. But this harmonica sounds nothing like Dylan’s style, and it is definitely not Dylan playing. Soon after the Nelson Riddle-style, somewhat syrupy string arrangement kicks in, the first voice you hear is Dylan’s — vulnerable, intimate, soft. “The very thought of you,” he sings over a quiet, jazzy piano trio, Streisand ceding the spotlight to Dylan up top. Streisand first appears on the song’s fourth line, “I’m living in a kind of daydream,” quite an appropriate entrance on a number which has a dreamy, almost hallucinatory quality, both sonically and socially, as in “Am I hallucinating, or is Bob Dylan duetting with Barbra Streisand?”
But it’s not a hallucination; it’s the real thing. This is not unknown musical territory for Dylan, who released a trio of albums featuring pre-rock pop standards beginning with Shadows in the Night in 2015. That experience clearly stood Dylan in good stead in approaching his vocal delivery here, understated yet authoritative, whispery yet dynamic. And having been long-time admirers of each other, both having expressed the desire to sing together for decades, they bring their top game to the track, Streisand in large part meeting Dylan on his own territory while sounding utterly gorgeous. It’s hard to fathom that the two had never met in person until the recording session for “The Very Thought of You,” up until that day having corresponded solely via letter and through intermediaries.
Dylan has always been underestimated as a vocalist, largely due to his unconventional tone. But he has long been a master of eloquent phrasing, as heard on the song’s third line, “The little ordinary things that everyone ought to do.” Dylan elongates a pause between “ought” and “to.” And when he sings “to do” he puts the two syllables together, as if “to-do” was a single word, enunciating the hard consonants that begin each word. The end result is a confident, sexy rhythmic gesture, which he repeats on the line, “And foolish though it may seem, to me that’s … everything.”
Near the end of the tune, Streisand and Dylan trade fours, tossing phrases back and forth with the virtuosity of jazz vocalists. The duo can’t help recalling Dylan’s many live duets with Joan Baez in the 1960s and 1970s, although they were so much younger then; they’re older than that, now. And Dylan has aged into a persona and voice that can pull off this kind of singing on this kind of song. His voice is authoritative as it is intimate, and he seems to pull from Streisand her most sophisticated singing on the album, which also includes duets with Paul McCartney, Sting, James Taylor, Mariah Carey, and Josh Groban, among others. In comparison with the Dylan, Streisand’s duets with McCartney, Taylor, and Sting are disappointingly flaccid, lacking distinctive character, as opposed to the tracks with Hozier, Sam Smith, and Seal, who both offer a meatier sound that, as with Dylan, offers a tonal contrast to Streisand, such that the duet partners seem to be engaging in a dance.
Streisand told David Remnick of the New Yorker, “[Dylan] was wonderful to work with. I was told that he didn’t want any direction. But when I talked to him about things that I suggested, he was so pliable — he was so open to suggestions. Everything I heard about him just went out the window. He stood on his feet for three hours with me.”
Streisand’s vocals are gorgeous, a master class in how not to over-sing and over-emote, how to use beauty and personality to convey emotion, how to make use of controlled glides and portamentos, a lesson that many female pop singers over the last two decades or more would have done well to learn. One of the major offenders and pioneers of that glossy style of over-singing is Mariah Carey, who along with Ariana Grande makes a surprisingly laid-back appearance on the album, despite an orchestral arrangement that seems to egg the singers on toward blasting their way through the sappy strings.
The Ray Noble song slowly reveals layers of meaning and emotion beyond the surface, much like Dylan’s and Streisand’s vocals. Until now perhaps best known via Nat “King” Cole’s version, “The Very Thought of You” has also been recorded by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Ricky Nelson. And in a bit of synchronicity, the Englishman Noble assigned the United States copyright to M. Witmark & Sons, which was Dylan’s publisher from 1962 to 1964.
As terrific as their duet on “The Very Thought of You” turned out to be, one would still have loved to hear the two duet on Dylan’s own song “Lay Lady Lay,” which he apparently wrote with Streisand in mind. Maybe next time, if there is one, which we sure hope there will be.
