At 83, Barbra Streisand Has Plenty Left to Say

“I usually find fault with something in an interview,” Barbra Streisand warns straight away during a recent phone call to discuss her new album, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two—a collection of duets she recorded with artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Ariana Grande. That’s true even of her recent Vanity Fair cover, which delved into Streisand’s six-decade career on the eve of her magnum opus of a memoir, My Name Is Barbra.

“Did you ever read my book?” the 83-year-old then asks. Of course, I reply. “Just want to set the record straight: I noticed in articles, it says it’s 992 pages. But my writing only goes up to 966 pages. Then there’s two pages of acknowledgements, if you want to count that. The book I wrote ends in 966 pages.” With that settled, we can move on. “Anyway, what else do you want to know?”

Let’s begin with the actual record: Streisand’s first since 2018’s Walls. The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two is a sequel to 2014’s Partners, where Streisand dueted with men including Billy Joel, John Legend, and her son, Jason Gould. Even before that album, Streisand participated in some of the most iconic duets of all time, like 1980’s “Guilty” with Barry Gibb and a 1963 mash-up of “Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again” alongside Judy Garland. This time around, Streisand imbued each track, sung opposite the likes of Paul McCartney and Sting, with bits of her personal history.

“I’m an actress, so I go for the lyrics, what it means to me,” she says. “If I can identify with a lyric, I sing it well.” For “Letter To My 13 Year Old Self,” performed with 26-year-old Icelandic singer Laufey, Streisand was deeply moved by the idea of a mother and daughter in conversation about the complexities of adolescence. “Write your story, fall in love a little too / The things you thought you’d never do,” they sing. “I wish I could go back and give her a squeeze / Myself at thirteen.”

Streisand had already done just that, writing an 18-page memoir of her life at the tender age of 13. “It’s one of those things that are going to the Library of Congress [some day],” she says. “That’s my first autobiography in a sense, isn’t it?” Streisand’s team later sends me a photocopy of the text, “My Thirteen Years,” which starts like this: “The story of my life begins as any other autobiography usually begins. I was born on Friday, April 24, 1942 at 5:04 a.m. I weighed seven pounds and five ounces. I was born to my proud parents, Mr. and Mrs. Emanuel Streisand.”

When singing Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” with Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, “I totally related to my husband and the first night we really met.” That would be 84-year-old actor James Brolin, to whom Streisand has been married for nearly 30 years. “It’s very easy: I have to go from reality, what I was feeling, and then that goes into the song,” she says. “If I pick a song, it’s because I relate to the lyrics. And I have to love the melody as well, of course.”

But Streisand wasn’t initially sold on singing Ray Noble’s 1934 standard “The Very Thought of You,” a tune 95-year-old Martin Erlichman—her manager of more than 60 years—had longed for her to perform. “I never wanted to sing that song,” she says, until the right duet partner entered the picture.

Streisand first heard about Bob Dylan when they were both starving artists in the early 1960s. “We were both walking around Greenwich Village. He was walking around with his guitar, trying to get a job, as well as me,” she says. “We’re the first two of our time signed by Columbia Records. We had never met till now.”

That’s not for a lack of trying on Dylan’s part. In the 1970s, she says, Dylan asked her to sing with him. “I thought, how would that be possible?” says Streisand. “I’m singing these romantic songs, and he had a whole other sound, and a completely different aura around him.”

So Dylan and Streisand spent decades in their own lanes, uniting only to sing a song she had previously ruled out. “The point is, most of the people off this record want me to sing their songs. When Bob was asked, he said, ‘I don’t want to sing my own song,’” she says. “He picked this song, ‘The Very Thought of You.’ I thought, that’s brilliant, Bob. It’s meant to be. In my book, I call it bashert. It just sometimes comes around in your life, and there it is.”

Streisand also reconnected with pop powerhouses Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey for “One Heart, One Voice,” a stunning showcase for their joint vocal prowess. “What was lovely is that I knew them already,” says Streisand. “Mariah had come to a couple of my concerts, and I met her socially a few times. She’s very warm and friendly. That was easy. Ariana, we asked to sing with me in…Jesus Christ.” She pauses. “Let’s see. I think it was Chicago. She was there doing something, and I was about to sing at a concert. That was five years ago, was it?” Another pause. “Is anybody on the phone that knows my life?”

Thanks to a member of team Streisand, she confirms that she first met Grande in 2019. The Oscar winner can’t help but chuckle: “Is that five years ago? What year are we in now? 2025. Time is going by so fast. It’s so filled with hard times for the people and for the country. That’s where my brain is. Music is a lovely distraction—I think it helps us all.”

Streisand, of course, is an outspoken Democrat who has threatened to leave the United States over Trump’s election to a second term in office. There are political allegories scattered throughout her latest album for those who choose to see them. Take album-closer “Love Will Survive,” a Grammy-nominated song performed with Seal that Streisand wrote for The Tattooist of Auschwitz. That 2024 limited series is based on Heather Morris’s 2017 novel about the real-life love story between Jewish Holocaust survivors Lali and Gita Sokolov.

Streisand is describing the show when she stops to wonder aloud if it’s still available to stream. “It’s on Peacock, my husband is saying to me. An eight out of 10. Honey, really? Great,” Streisand says to Brolin, presumably referring to the series’ audience rating on IMDB. “It was very moving, very well-acted. You should watch it, because it’s important to know what happened in history. Because history does repeat itself with the threat of fascism in our country. It’s a very sensitive time. I watch everything that has to do with that period of time in Europe, and want to make sure, we hope in this country, that it never happens here.”

But how does one Barbra Streisand—voice of a generation who is still finding new ways to express herself into her eighth decade—keep the hope alive? “I believe in the power of prayer, and goodness,” she says. “I pray for people to come to realize the truth and the importance of kindness, sensitivity, love. Which I think they are.”