The 2014 career-spanning anthology Keep Me in Your Heart for a While: The Best of Madeleine Peyroux, showcases tracks from throughout the Georgia-born, Paris-based vocalist's career. Starting with her 1996 debut album, Dreamland, and running through her 2013 studio effort The Blue Room, Keep Me in Your Heart for a While reveals Peyroux's transformation from a bluesy, Billie Holiday-influenced vocal ingenue to a mature and sophisticated interpreter of popular song, both new and old. Here we get such tracks as "La Vie en Rose," "Smile," "Between the Bars," "Dance Me to the End of Love," and more. Also included is Peyroux's previously unreleased recording of Warren Zevon's "Keep Me in Your Heart," from the film Union Square.
Over 2 decades since his last compilation on BBE Music, Jasper The Vinyl Junkie returns to the label with ‘Vinyl Junkie Thangs’ a bumper collection of effortlessly cool, eclectic grooves for heads and feet.
On The Blue Room, her second Decca recording, Madeleine Peyroux and producer Larry Klein re-examine the influence of Ray Charles' revolutionary 1962 date, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. They don't try to re-create the album, but remake some of its songs and include others by composers whose work would benefit from the genre-blurring treatment Charles pioneered. Bassist David Pilch, drummer Jay Bellerose, guitarist Dean Parks, and pianist/organist Larry Goldings are the perfect collaborators. Most these ten tracks feature string arrangements by Vince Mendoza. Five tunes here are reinterpretations of Charles' from MSICAWM. "Take These Chains" commences as a sultry jazz tune, and in Peyroux's vocal, there is no supplication – only a demand. Parks' pedal steel moves between sounding like itself and a clarinet. Goldings' alternating B-3 and Rhodes piano offer wonderful color contrast and make it swing. Her take on "Bye Bye Love" feels as if it's being narrated to a confidante, and juxtaposes early Western swing with a bluesy stroll. A rock guitar introduces "I Can't Stop Loving You," but Peyroux's phrasing has more country-blues in it than we've heard from her before. The use of a trumpet in "Born to Lose" and "You Don't Know Me," with Mendoza's dreamy strings, allow for Peyroux to deliver her most stylized jazz performances on the set.