Unexpected voices

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, October 3rd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Music for the Gipper.

The Ronald Reagan bio-pic from last year featured Dennis Quaid portraying America’s 40th president.

EICHER: But the film also inspired two brand-new albums. And the voices behind them… let’s just say there are a few you might not expect to find on a Reagan soundtrack.

Here’s WORLD music critic Arsenio Orteza.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Curb Records has just released two new various-artists albums associated with Sean McNamara’s 2024 biopic Reagan. One is the official motion picture soundtrack, the other an album of songs inspired by the film. They would’ve come out sooner, but the film’s music supervisor, Tim Cook, unexpectedly died, leaving Team Reagan to figure out how to complete the projects on its own. The good news is that the albums were worth the wait.

MUSIC: [Swinging on a Star by Scott Stapp]

This is “Swinging on a Star” as sung in the film by Creed’s lead singer Scott Stapp. It only plays for a few moments onscreen, but it appears in a complete—and a completely entertaining—version on the Official Motion Picture Soundtrack. And, as anyone who has seen the film knows, it’s not the only selection from the Great American Songbook era that gets a fresh makeover. The singer MŌRIAH, for instance, contributes a sparkling version of the 1937 Andrews Sisters hit “Beir mir bist du schön.” And Robert Davi, who in the film plays Leonid Brezhnev, contributes the Frank Sinatra hits “This Town” and, appropriately enough, “Nancy (with the Laughing Face).”

MUSIC: [Nancy (with the Laughing Face) by Robert Davi]

I told Mark Joseph, the film’s producer, how pleasantly surprising it was to discover that great actors could also be great singers and vice versa. He agreed with the “pleasant” part. But he wasn’t all that “surprised.”

JOSEPH: A lot of our actors could easily have been rock stars. Dennis Quaid came to Hollywood to be a recording artist, you know. He wanted to be kind of in the Bruce Springsteen vibe, and just as fate would have it, he went down the acting road, and I think Robert is another one that could easily have had that kind of Michael Bublé, Josh Groban-type career. The acting kind of overtook the music, but Robert is very, very talented in interpreting the great American songbook.

I asked Joseph how he’d gone about assembling the talent on Curb’s new Reagan albums. He told me that he’d made a list of about 60 acts from whom he’d welcome contributions. Then he made each one a pitch and waited for a response.. Some ended up singing songs that were used in the film while the others contributed songs more appropriate to a collection called Songs Inspired by the Film.

Unlike the official-soundtrack songs, all of the Inspired by… songs are originals, and, as one can tell by their titles, many of them are rather “on the nose.” Travis Tritt’s contribution, for instance, is called “A Shining City on the Hill,” and Lee Greenwood’s “Start the World Over,” is a completed version of a song started by Mike Curb and Ronald Reagan himself. But others weren’t as interested in political themes and instead focused on the love story between Reagan and his second wife Nancy.

MUSIC: [Always by the Commodores]

This song, “Always,” is by the Commodores. The Kathie Lee Gifford-Claude Kelly duet “I Knew It Would Be You” mines the Ron-and-Nancy vein as well.

MUSIC: [I Knew It Would Be You by Kathie Lee Gifford and Claude Kelly]

As you can hear, one benefit of Mark Joseph’s cast-a-wide net approach is that it guarantees stylistic variety. Another is that it raises the odds that something unexpected will happen. When Joseph sent out invitations for the album The Passion of Christ: Songs in 2004, he never thought that he’d get a nearly six-minute track from the R&B superstar Lauryn Hill, who, according to Joseph, broke down crying in the theater and composed her song on the spot.

But that surprise was nothing compared to the ones awaiting Joseph where the respondents to the Reagan film were concerned.

MUSIC: [Don’t Fence Me In” by Bob Dylan]

Yes, that’s none other than Bob Dylan performing a song first made famous by Roy Rogers. And if you’ve seen the Reagan film, you know that the song plays over the closing credits. Getting Dylan to contribute an original recording was a masterstroke if only because any album with a previously unreleased Dylan track is guaranteed to sell. But Joseph thinks that the song is significant for other reasons.

JOSEPH: I just thought “Don't Fence Me” kind of summarizes both Bob and Ronald Reagan in one swoop. You know, you can't predict what Bob Dylan's going to do next. And—you know, he's got thousands of fans who are asking, “Why in the world are you on a Reagan soundtrack?” And I can't give you a definitive answer either. That's just the way Bob is. And the same with Ronald Reagan.

The biggest surprise of all, though, was getting Gene Simmons of Kiss to sing the standard “Stormy Weather.” And all that it took was a private screening of the film.

JOSEPH: He really threw me a curveball. He called me and he said, “Let's do a song that really unites all the different age groups and all the different eras.” And he just really wanted to come in from a totally unexpected place, and so we settled on “Stormy Weather.”

Actually, Simmons didn’t come in from a totally unexpected place. He had, after all, concluded his 1978 solo album with a straight-faced performance of “When You Wish upon a Star.”

MUSIC: [When You Wish upon a Star by Gene Simmons]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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