To Barbra Streisand, a duet isn’t just a song. “It’s a dramatic process,” she said. “It’s wondering who is this guy in the song? Who is this girl? What’s happening with them?”
Figuring that out plays straight into Streisand’s core identity as an artist. “I’m an actress first,” she added. “I like drama.”
Small wonder she has performed character-driven duets so often, so creatively and with such commercial success. In October 1963, following the release of Streisand’s debut album, Judy Garland invited her to appear in an episode of her TV show; their joint performance all but anointed the younger as her vocal heir.
In the decades since, many of her highest-charting songs have been duets, starting in 1978 with Neil Diamond on their death-of-a-love ballad, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” followed the next year by her diva-off with Donna Summer on “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Both shot straight to No. 1. In the early 1980s, she scored two Top 10 Billboard hits with Barry Gibb, chased by a dalliance with Bryan Adams
In 2014, Streisand issued an entire album of double billings titled “Partners,” which teamed her with stars from the quick (John Mayer on “Come Rain or Come Shine”) to the dead (Elvis Presley via a vocal sample from the singer’s 1956 recording of “Love Me Tender”). Both that album, and its follow-up, “Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway,” scaled Billboard’s peak.
Next week, Streisand, 83, will release a sequel, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two,” featuring contemporaries of different musical sensibilities, like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, as well as younger voices including Hozier and Sam Smith.
Talking by phone from the bedroom of her Malibu home last week, Streisand chatted amiably about a few of her latest duets, some of her favorites from the past and others of historic note.
Streisand’s passion for duets began, in part, after seeing the 1955 movie version of “Guys and Dolls.” “That’s when I fell in love with Marlon Brando!” she said. “I wanted to be Jean Simmons,” his romantic partner for several songs in the film.
Streisand said her breakthrough duet with Diamond foreshadowed her role as a film director. When the two performed their song on the 1980 Grammys, the producers wanted them to sing to each other on fixed stools. “I said, ‘No, no no!’” Streisand said. “I thought we should start from opposite sides of the stage and come together during the song. It was like directing actors.”
She took inspiration for her staging from the 1945 David Lean film “Brief Encounter,” about a foundering marriage. She had just as strong a visual and emotional connection to Garland. Their melding of two songs on her show — “Get Happy” from the veteran and “Happy Days Are Here Again” for the newcomer — wove their styles, allowing each voice to rise and fall with intensifying drama. “Judy was full of emotion, even more than me,” Streisand recalled. “She was so fragile,” she added. “I thought, ‘Why is that?’ She’s so famous and loved. Now I know what she was going through.”
Three years after her appearance with Garland, Streisand appeared on a duet with perhaps her favorite songwriter, Harold Arlen, who penned “Over the Rainbow” as well as classics like “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “Stormy Weather.” On the sole album Arlen ever released, Streisand sang with him on a madcap version of his “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” pairing her gymnastic vocals with his fatherly tones. Only much later did she discover that Columbia Records released his album, teasingly titled “Harold Sings Arlen (With Friend),” solely because of the two tracks featuring her.
“By 1966, I guess I had achieved some popularity,” Streisand said sheepishly; by then she had amassed seven Top 10 albums, including the chart-topping “People.”
In 1973, when the singer was creating her innovative TV special “Barbra Streisand … and Other Musical Instruments,” which matched her voice to a sitar as well as a cacophony of household appliances, she performed a standout duet with Ray Charles on “Crying Time.” “You could feel everything about Ray in his voice — his capacity to love, his anger, his warmth,” Streisand said. “It was his soul immortalized.”
During the show, she sang separately with his famous backup singers, the Raelettes, on “Sweet Inspiration,” allowing her to refigure Broadway belting with a gospel fervor. Even more unexpected was her face-off with Summer. “It was as far away from my ballad style as possible,” Streisand said. “But I like challenges, and my son was a big fan of Donna Summer. For my son, I’d do anything.”
The alchemy she had with another disco-era icon, Barry Gibb of the Bee-Gees, came more easily than any effort of her career. “I didn’t have time to make that album because I was writing ‘Yentl,’” she said. Gibb accommodated her by producing every sound on the album save her vocals. “All I had to do was sing each song 10 times.”
Her biggest input was telling him the album needed another up-tempo number. It turned out to be “Guilty,” which allowed their voices to skip along the melody like stones across a glistening lake. “It was exactly what I wanted,” she said.
Not every duet Streisand has cut has pleased her. In 1984, she and Kim Carnes recorded “Make No Mistake, He’s Mine,” sung from the perspective of two women who each claim the man they have in common loves only them. “I liked her raspy voice as a contrast to mine,” Streisand wrote of Carnes in a follow-up email to our interview. “But I never truly related to the lyrics. The idea of two jealous women fighting over a guy was an idea I wasn’t really comfortable with.”
By contrast, a posthumous duet with Anthony Newley on his song “Who Can I Turn To?” allowed her to close an old wound. The two briefly dated in the mid-60s, but the relationship ended badly. “I was mad at him,” Streisand said. So, when he sent her a song he wrote for her, “Too Much Woman,” she ignored it. Fifteen years after his death, however, she leaped at the chance to croon with an old master tape of him. “I always loved the way he sang,” she said.
Of her new duets, the least expected is with Dylan. Though they each began playing Greenwich Village clubs in the early ’60s, they occupied wildly different worlds. In 1970, however, Dylan sent her flowers with a card. “In childish handwriting in different-color crayons, he wrote ‘Would you sing with me?’” she said. “I thought, ‘What the hell am I going to sing with Bob Dylan?’”
Though she didn’t respond at the time, when she recently discovered he had written “Lay Lady Lay” for her, she came around. It may have helped that Dylan released a trio of albums featuring standards starting with “Shadows in the Night” in 2015. Dylan chose the song they sang, “The Very Thought of You,” but he took total direction from Streisand in the recording. “He did it over and over,” she said. “He was incredibly receptive and in the moment with me.”
The most innovative new pas de deux is with Hozier on “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Rarely, if ever, has this glacial classic been performed as a duet, transforming it from a monologue into a conversation. Streisand said she wouldn’t have recorded the song any other way. “It was too related to the girl who made it famous.” (Roberta Flack, who took it to No. 1 in 1972.)
Perhaps the new piece closest to Streisand’s heart is with Laufey, a 26-year-old Icelandic musician. The lyrics to “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self” let each artist look back, and nurture, their past inner teens. When she was 13, Streisand said, her teacher asked her to write her autobiography, a treasure she has kept. “It’s going to the Library of Congress,” she said, adding ruefully, “if there is a Library of Congress.” Streisand was also 13 when she cut her first amateur record, at which point she discovered she could play around with a melody. “That was my first improvisation!” she said.
When asked to pick her own favorite duets, she highlighted “I Have a Love” and “One Hand, One Heart,” from “West Side Story,” with Johnny Mathis. “I remember the first time I saw him on TV as a kid,” she said. “Those eyes, that voice. My God, I got a crush on him!”
She also singled out her tête-à-tête with John Mayer on “Come Rain or Come Shine”: “I was fascinated by how great he plays guitar and sings.”
While talking about her old duets brings back sweet memories, Streisand emphasized that it isn’t her nature to analyze past work. “That was then,” she said. “Now is now.”
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