Earworm of the Day: Who Wants To Live Forever

There's nothing quite like waking up with a pure soprano in your head, as I did this morning with Sarah Brightman's Who Wants To Live Forever echoing like an angel's voice over the alarm.

The song is from Sarah’s 1997 album Time To Say Goodbye, her top-selling album. I first discovered her perhaps ten years earlier, when I heard Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom Of the Opera for the first time and discovered what I termed “the voice of an angel” (original, eh?). The first response I received to this declaration was one of my co-workers saying, somewhat sourly, “Oh, she must be a soprano.” My co-worker was an alto, so I guess I can understand her reaction.

So Sarah went on to marry and divorce Andrew Lloyd Webber and invent the Classical Crossover genre. She was uniquely positioned to do this, since she’d had some success as a pop singer, then as a musical actress and then as a classical singer. She possesses a voice for all three genres, and I’m not sure what is more crossover than that.

She sings duets with all sorts of classical singers like Andrea Boccelli and Placido Domingo, who have very nice voices, but they are really classical singers playing at something that noses around the edges of pop, never quite following Sarah all the way over the line. It’s okay, though, I’m pretty sure that’s why Sarah invented classical crossover, so her favorite handsome tenors had a place to sing with her.