Singers & Singing

Bradley Cooper talks about making a new version of the film 'A Star is Born.' Bradley also starred in it opposite Lady Gaga. This is the fourth version, one other version starred Judy Garland and James Mason.

British singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn writes music that chronicles themes in women's lives that aren't often addressed in pop lyrics. Take, for instance, the single "Babies," off her new solo album Record. The song is meant to be a humorous ode to birth control, but there's also a deeper feeling to it.

Whitfield, who died Feb. 9, started in the San Francisco Opera in the 1970s before moving on to piano bars. She later performed regularly at New York's Algonquin Hotel. Originally broadcast in 1988.

Cook, who starred in Broadway shows like The Music Man and Candide, died on Tuesday. She spoke to Fresh Air in 2016 about her struggle with addiction and her second career as a cabaret singer.

Merle Streep sings badly in the new film Florence Foster Jenkins, based on a NYC heiress and arts patron who performed arias and art songs totally off key, but made recordings and performed at Carnegie Hall. Streep is actually a very good singer which she's shown in previous films.

After starring in Broadway shows like The Music Man and Candide, Cook struggled with addiction, then staged a successful second career as a cabaret singer. Her new memoir is Then and Now.

"The Empress of the Blues" gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s. A new 10-CD box set collects the complete works of the colossus who straddled jazz and blues.

In 2003, Donna Summer appeared on Fresh Air to talk about her memoir, Ordinary Girl, her hit Love to Love You Baby and her collaborator, record producer Giorgio Moroder. We remember Summer -- who died Thursday at the age of 63 -- with excerpts from that interview.

The standards singer's new solo album, Strictly Romancin', explores the ups and downs of love. Russell sings several tracks from the record during this interview and performance.

MacFarlane is best known for creating the animated TV shows Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. But he's also a singer whose new album features songs from the Great American Songbook.

From the late 1950s up until her last stage appearance in 1990, Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland was one of the world's most admired and celebrated opera stars. She died Sunday at age 83. Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz looks back at the life and work of the singer known as "La Stupenda."

The comic actor, who played Jack on TV's Will and Grace, makes his Broadway debut in a revival of Neil Simon's musical Promises, Promises. He has also portrayed comedian Jerry Lewis in the made-for-TV movie Martin and Lewis and Jack Nicholson's valet in The Bucket List.

She was a home-grown phenomenon, an operatic soprano trained entirely in the U.S. in an era when most singers developed their craft in Europe, and she made a notable second career after her retirement as a formidable arts administrator and advocate. Fresh Air spoke with her in 1985.

Rhythm-and-blues singer Ruth Brown died last week at the age of 78 from complications following a heart attack. Brown got her start in the 1940s and influenced an entire generation of singers including Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard and Bonnie Raitt. Her hits include "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and "Teardrops From My Eyes." Later, she appeared in John Waters' film Hairspray and in the Broadway hit Black and Blue. She published an autobiography, Miss Rhythm, in 1996. Rhythm." This interview originally aired on Dec. 22, 1997.

Rock historian Ed Ward profiles the early years of the Franklin sisters. Aretha Franklin is a renowned soul legend, but her two sisters, Carolyn and Erma, were also singers.

Actor Neil Patrick Harris is starring in the new CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother -- but most people know him as a teenage doctor in the early 1990s TV series Doogie Howser, MD, which is now available on DVD. Harris also played a parody of himself in the film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.