Marcus Simeone…with Tracy Stark
Alone
(Miranda Music)
June 6, 2015
Reviewed by Victoria Ordin
Marcus Simeone Alone…with Tracy Stark is a worthy successor to the award-winning singer’s The Truth About…, which Stephen Holden called in his 2013 New York Times review a “unique, gentle and powerful mix of songs” that “tell a simple story of one who has faced, conquered and interpreted life” through song. On this, his fifth CD on the Miranda Music label, Simeone teams up with the luminous Maria Ottavia on a breathtaking, stripped bare rendition of the The King and I classic, “I Have Dreamed,” and “I’ll Never Say Goodbye.” (Ottavia knows a thing or two about struggle, having first undergone surgery which halted her career for a year, and then lost two close friends in 9/11, which forever changed her and prompted a return-—musically and otherwise-—to her Catholic faith.
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The purity of Simeone’s tenor as he glides effortlessly from Rodgers and Hart (“Where or When”) and Peter Allen (“I Could Have Been a Sailor”) to Janis Ian (the political but not preachy “Married in London” and “When Angels Cry”) convinces one that he has indeed found peace through struggle. The first Ian song, a sort of doggerel set to a simple melody, is bemused rather than anguished (“Amsterdam tells me/I’m partnered for life/But back in America/Land of the free/I’m a threat to the national security”).
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The anguish behind the acceptance we get in the second song, nowhere more urgently than than in the soul-wrenching lyric, “Some say [AIDS] is a judgment on us all/I can’t believe that God would be that small.”
The eleventh track, “Kindness Makes Me Cry,” tonally splits the difference between the two Ian songs: “Some days I feel my anger is more than justified/But the kindness of my friends always makes me cry,” lyrics from Maria Gentile’s MAC Award-winning song that might well have served as the album’s epigraph instead of the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross line in the jacket.
Marcus Simeone Alone…with Tracy Stark lacks the range of his prior release, but Simeone’s at once piercing and reassuring “truth-telling” (which Holden compares to Johnny Mathis, Michael Jackson, and Luther Vandross at their best) more than makes up for it. Stark’s haunting piano anchors the album’s ballads, insistently driving home its ultimate truth (a truth embedded in the CD’s very title): in the presence of music and friendship, we are never truly alone; as long as we can mutually “read in the stories” and “make sense” through the tears, we will always “get by.”
