Gavin Edwards

A chance encounter 25 years ago with singer Mary J. Blige in the parking lot of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles helped her understand: “Your father meant so much to me. I could feel so much of his joy and pain,” Blige told her. It underscored how Donny Hathaway had a legacy beyond his own family — as a duet partner with Roberta Flack, as a major talent whose career was cut short by mental illness, as a pioneer of polychromatic R&amp;B; music.

Lalah Hathaway, a successful singer in her own right and the elder of Hathaway's two daughters, has sporadically covered songs by her father. She won a Grammy in 2016 for “Little Ghetto Boy,” her version of his 1972 single; she keeps it in her home next to his 2019 lifetime achievement Grammy. On Wednesday, however, she will perform an entire concert of Donny Hathaway’s music for the first time, opening the summer season of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, at Damrosch Park in Manhattan.

When Lalah Hathaway began touring the world, around 1990, she started to understand her father’s legacy. “In Japan, someone shows up who doesn’t speak English, dressed like my dad, and has all the records, laminated, and wants me to sign them,” she said. “There’s so many ideas about my dad. He’s such an enigma. Really, he was a dude that loved music. He wanted to create something that would last forever — and he did.”

Born on Oct. 1, 1945, Donny Hathaway was raised in St. Louis by his grandmother. He started playing piano at age 4 and toured the local gospel circuit with her as a child. His sister Jacqueline Bethany said that he was very active in their local Baptist church — he spent his teenage years making vocal arrangements for the choir and playing piano during services.

“The other musicians in the church would stand around him and watch his hands, because the boy could play,” Bethany said in an interview. Even at a young age, Hathaway blended his classical training with gospel and jazz.

Hathaway’s musical talents earned him a scholarship at Howard University, where he was famed for singing with the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and gigging off campus with a jazz trio. Eulaulah Vann, a fellow music major, recalled in an interview that Hathaway aced his classes: “He even had a professor who told him, ‘If you can take my test without coming to class, you’re welcome to do it.’ So a couple of times he did.” Vann and Hathaway would marry in 1967, after he dropped out of Howard to pursue his musical career.

The Hathaways moved to Chicago so Donny could work for Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label as a producer and an A&amp;R; man. He became well-known as an arranger, doing sessions with singers such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Butler and Lena Horne. Bethany sometimes sat in the corner of the studio and watched.

“I didn’t see any unsatisfied customers,” she said. She witnessed the session where Aretha Franklin cut the hit single “Rock Steady” and Hathaway played organ: “He made it sound so gospel.”

An encounter with saxophonist King Curtis in an elevator led to a record contract with Atlantic — Curtis was impressed by how Hathaway demonstrated his perfect pitch, humming at the same frequency as the elevator motor, and recommended him to the label.

Ed Howard, who would go on to work as the general manager of Donny Hathaway Enterprises and collaborated with the singer, was awe-struck when he first heard Hathaway’s music, on his 1970 debut album, “Everything Is Everything.”

“It had a Ray Charles feel,” he said in an interview. “There weren’t that many people putting that much orchestration into a record like that. There’s so much going on, it took a while to really pick up what’s happening rhythmically.”

Hathaway’s “This Christmas” would eventually become a seasonal standard, but fizzled on its initial 1970 release. Hathaway didn’t have any real chart success until he partnered with Roberta Flack in 1971; the two vocalists, who had attended Howard together, had hit versions of “You’ve Got a Friend,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’” and “Where Is the Love,” singing with the trust and intimacy of two trapeze artists who knew exactly when to catch each other and when to let go.

“Donny was a tremendous talent,” Flack wrote in an email. “He was not only a singer, but an arranger, composer, conductor and teacher. His vocal quality was complex. In the studio, Donny and I had an artistic pairing unlike any other for me, before or since.”

Hathaway followed up the duets with “Live,” a concert album documenting two 1971 shows, where he not only demonstrated his total command of a crowd, but also took other people’s songs, like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and fearlessly made them his own.

“Every record company I’ve ever been at, I’ve wanted to make a record like a Donny Hathaway live record,” Lalah Hathaway said. “Having grown up with that record and listened to the people in the audience, I’ve tried to figure out what they look like, where they were sitting. These ladies talking to my dad at the show, I have imagined them hundreds of times.”

Howard said Hathaway would do three sets a night. “Donny never played a set the same way, because when people came for the 7 o’clock show, they wanted to stay for the 9 o’clock show,” he said. “Between sets, he would write a different arrangement for the whole set. He had such a tremendous gift.”

But as his career took off Hathaway started acting erratically. “I saw something was not right,” Eulaulah Hathaway said. She called her husband’s management office and was told they had also noticed disturbing behavior, such as his randomly screaming at secretaries. “Well, when were you going to tell me?” she asked dryly.

Donny Hathaway was hospitalized in both New York and Chicago for paranoid schizophrenia. “He was 26 when it really came down upon him,” she said. He was released and given a heavy medication regimen, 14 pills a day. “I’d get the pills ready for him and sit them on the counter,” she said. “He was probably figuring out a way not to take them.”

Donny Hathaway didn’t release any music for five years. “He just kind of dropped out of existence,” Howard said. But in 1978, he hit No. 2 on the pop charts with “The Closer I Get to You,” a comeback duet with Flack. They started working on another album together in New York, but were hindered by Hathaway’s mental-health issues. “Donny kept leaving the studio and going to the bathroom,” Howard said. When they found him on the floor of the bathroom, sobbing, saying that someone had tried to kill him, they stopped the sessions.

That evening — Jan. 13, 1979 — Hathaway, Howard and the manager David Franklin retreated to Flack’s home. “She cooked dinner for us, a Jamaican dish with spoonbread and rice and fish,” Howard said. “Donny drew a picture of a gun on some music manuscript paper and asked me, ‘What if somebody came up to you and said “Bang!”?’ I took it away and X-ed the gun out, trying to keep him calm.”

Howard and Hathaway went to the Essex House, the hotel where they were staying, and retired to their separate rooms. Hathaway slid the plate glass out of his window, neatly laid it under a table, and, still wearing his overcoat, fell to his death from the 15th floor. It was ruled a suicide, although his widow always believed it was an accident; she didn’t think he meant to harm himself, but knew that his mental illness often made him careless. “I wasn’t really surprised,” she said. “I knew he was a sick person. He didn’t really need to be working at that point anyway. I had expressed that to his partners, but people don’t care.”

Forty years after her father’s death, Lalah Hathaway said: “Grief is a process. Art is a process. Me stepping into that light and allowing him to come through is all a process. It may sound cheesy, but it’s an esoteric spiritual journey.”

She connects particularly deeply with “A Song for You,” written by Leon Russell but performed by Donny Hathaway as a hymn of heartbreak. Sometimes she performs it a cappella so she can feel more deeply connected to her father.

“It’s strange; sometimes I’m on a stage and I’m not there,” she said. “Sometimes I’m up there and he’s there. And sometimes I’m up there and I’m very aware that people are looking through me and seeing him standing there.”

Event Information:

Lalah Hathaway performs on Wednesday night at 7 at the Guggenheim Bandshell in Damrosch Park in Manhattan, along with the Illustrious Blacks, Baby Rose, the Last Poets, Roosevelt André Credit and the Lappelle Choir; lincolncenter.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/music/donny-hathaway-lalah-hathaway.html" id="3d06d757-c539-37fb-a405-8f37febaafaf">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — “I used to listen to Donny Hathaway records, and I would cry,” Lalah Hathaway said in a recent interview, and the reason wasn’t hard to discern — her father died in 1979, when he was 33 years old and she was just 10. What was mysterious to her was how his symphonic soul music and crushed-velvet voice touched other people: “I would see someone listening to them and think, ‘What are you crying about?’”

Lalah Hathaway Singing for a Father Who Died Too Soon

<h1>The music video for the 1983 hit single “White Wedding” featured a barbed-wire wedding ring, a motorcycle crashing through a stained-glass window and singer Billy Idol unveiling his telegenic sneer. Its director, David Mallet, said it was filmed in one day, like many of the clips he did then, and aimed for a display much different from those we’re accustomed to today.</h1>

“We were making videos for a screen that the very largest was 32 inches,” Mallet said, also lamenting that a lot of video work wasn’t carefully archived. As a result, YouTube — the place most consumers watch music videos today — still has plenty of videos represented by glitchy dubs off ancient VHS tapes. “A lot of them just don’t hold up when they get blown up to 60-inch screens,” Mallet added.

On Wednesday, however, YouTube and Universal Music Group announced that they were upgrading more than 1,000 popular music videos to high definition, releasing them through 2020. Artists in the initial batch of 100 videos include Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Boyz II Men, the Killers, Lionel Richie, Kiss, George Strait and the Spice Girls.

“Once that dirty coloring is removed, it’s a lot more vital somehow,” said Billy Idol, who has six videos in the first wave of upgrades, including “White Wedding,” “Rebel Yell” and “Dancing With Myself.” “It gives these videos a chance against the modern high-quality definition. And I’m forever that age in these videos — it’s kind of fantastic.”

Upgrading the clips meant archival work with a dizzying array of formats. Barak Moffitt, the executive vice president of content strategy and operations at Universal, named a few: “We have sources coming from everything from original film to Digibeta, HDCAM to 1-inch Cs and Betacam SPs to D2s — and the format it was shot in isn’t necessarily the format it was edited in.”

Universal tried to remain true to artists’ original intentions: The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” looks so much crisper after its renovation, Universal contacted the group and the director Spike Jonze to make sure they weren’t violating the video’s aesthetic of cheap 1970s cop shows. Moffitt noted, “The graininess of a tube television set, which is what they were going for, is not the dithery compression artifact that you can see on a highly compressed video, so cleaning it up went more to the retro intent.”

Sometimes detective work was required, as when the team discovered that the audio for Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days” video was a unique recording made just for the clip. And sometimes it was as straightforward as upgrading the audio to a better source. Michael Nash, the executive vice president of digital strategy at Universal, explained that historically, “A lot of times, the first thing you were putting in front of consumers was the music video, even before the single went to radio. Very often a music video would be sent to MTV before the final stereo mix of the single was done.”

YouTube long ago supplanted MTV as the primary venue for music videos, but it has recently seen threats to its dominance with the rise of “vertical videos” formatted for Instagram and Spotify, and periodically it has contentious negotiations with record labels over the royalty rates it pays each time a song is streamed, and whether that constitutes a “value gap.”

So a project that burnished everyone’s reputation was particularly appealing for YouTube. “The entire industry can come together and do something great. There are lots of winners and no losers,” said Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, who previously had stints as a top executive at Warner Music and Def Jam — and began his career managing hip-hop artists, including the Beastie Boys.

When the Universal team showed Cohen a demo reel of their high-definition efforts, they made sure it included “Sabotage.” It had the desired effect: “I went into the studio and I saw the Beastie Boys, and I had a mind-melt,” he said.

Making the initiative happen at Universal meant shifting how the company thought about these old clips, considering them not just as commercials for intellectual property (such as albums) but as valuable pieces of intellectual property themselves. “We are convinced that this effort will pay for itself over time,” Nash said.

While it is possible to watch YouTube on 70-inch 4K TV sets with surround sound, many people use their phones. So will Lady Gaga fans even notice when the audio and video of “Bad Romance” get upgraded? With evangelical fervor, if no hard data, Nash insisted that they will.

“Audiences can tell the difference when it’s put in front of them, they can understand the difference when it’s explained to them, and it’s our obligation as partners of the artists to put the closest representation of the artist’s voice and vision in front of audiences,” he said. He paused for breath. “If you didn’t educate consumers about what grand cru was, everyone would be drinking wine out of a box.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/arts/music/youtube-universal-video-upgrade.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

That glitchy music video on YouTube? It's getting an upgrade

On Wednesday, however, YouTube and Universal Music Group announced that they were upgrading more than 1,000 popular music videos to high definition, releasing them through 2020. Artists in the initial batch of 100 videos include Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Boyz II Men, the Killers, Lionel Richie, Kiss, George Strait and the Spice Girls.

Many Nirvana biographies rehash the basics of Cobain’s story or peddle conspiracy theories that he was murdered, but there are plenty of ways to go deeper. Here’s what to read, listen to, watch and explore:

Books

With nearly 300 pages of photo replicas of Cobain’s personal journals and letters (and doodles, sketches and song lists), this 2002 book is funny, painful and shockingly intimate: a guided tour of the singer’s own churning psyche. “Its hard to decipher the difference between a sincere entertainer and an honest swindler,” Cobain wrote.

‘Come as You Are’ (Three Rivers)

This deeply reported 1993 biography by Michael Azerrad, first published while Cobain was alive, was the original bible for Nirvana fans. Its strongest passages evoke the life of young Cobain in Aberdeen, Washington, a child of divorce who would sometimes spend the weekend killing time at a local logging company where his father worked: “He would get into his dad’s van and listen to Queen’s ‘News of the World’ over and over again on the eight-track. Sometimes he’d listen so long that he’d drain the battery and they’d have to find someone to jump-start the engine.”

‘Heavier Than Heaven’ (Hachette)

Charles R. Cross, formerly the editor of the Seattle music paper The Rocket, covered the Nirvana story from early on — and conducted more than 400 interviews for this thorough, definitive 2001 biography. Cobain’s widow, musician Courtney Love, granted Cross extensive interviews and access to Cobain’s archives, including arcana such as a visual assignment he completed during his final stay in rehab: “For ‘surrender,’ he drew a man with a bright light emanating from him. For ‘depressed,’ he showed an umbrella surrounded by ties.”

Articles

‘Takeoff: The Oral History of Nirvana’s Crossover Moment’ (Cuepoint)

When Nirvana’s “Nevermind” hit No. 1 soon after its 1991 release, it shocked the band members and their grunge cohort, who had assumed that at best, the group would be underground heroes. Its multiplatinum success also opened the doors for many Nirvana-bes. This oral history by Nick Soulsby tells that story from the viewpoint of Nirvana’s college-rock peers, such as Gary Floyd of the opening act Sister Double Happiness remembering Nirvana’s “road manager telling everyone backstage one night the CD had hit 1 million sales that day. They seemed almost embarrassed.”

‘The Dark Side of Kurt Cobain’ (The Advocate)

Cobain loudly and frequently declared himself as an ally of gay people (and women, and people of color), so it was fitting that he gave one of his best interviews in this 1993 cover story with The Advocate, telling Kevin Allman, “I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.”

‘Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck’ (Rolling Stone)

In Cobain’s last major interview, he informed David Fricke that he had wanted to call Nirvana’s “In Utero” album “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” “but I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand.” He insisted that the suicidal sentiment was only a joke: “I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.”

‘Never More’ (The Village Voice)

After Cobain’s death, Ann Powers filed a raw dispatch from Seattle, reporting how the tragedy affected his friends and the neighbors who had never met him. “The kids I found who did mourn Cobain, hovering behind police lines at the house where he’d died or building shrines from candles and Raisin Bran boxes at the Sunday night vigil organized by three local radio stations, seemed to think of him more as a lost friend than as a candidate for that dreaded assignment, role model.”

Live Videos

‘Nirvana — The Moon, New Haven 1991’

On Sept. 26, 1991, just two days after the release of “Nevermind,” Nirvana played a great, sweaty show at a tiny club in New Haven — and miraculously, it was captured on this remarkably high-quality amateur video. The set featured just a few songs from the unfamiliar “Nevermind,” leaning heavily on the band’s 1989 debut, “Bleach.” Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl all performed with joy and abandon, looking more at home in a filthy black room with a low ceiling than they ever did in arenas.

Nirvana’s last concert, on March 1, 1994, at a cavernous airport terminal that had been converted into a club, was an ordeal for a burned-out Cobain: He wanted to end the band, he wanted to divorce Love, he wanted to score drugs at the Munich train station. But the show (rendered here with just the first 10 minutes of video but a full 80 minutes of audio) was one final scream of pain, ending with “Heart-Shaped Box.” “Hey, wait, I got a new complaint,” Cobain sang, never meaning it more.

Playing acoustically for 44 minutes, Nirvana paid tribute to influences ranging from David Bowie to the Meat Puppets, and showed the delicate beauty behind its distorted guitars. And with the final song, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” Cobain gave one of his greatest vocal performances; it felt powerful enough to bring the curtain down on all of human existence.

Documentary Footage

‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ (Amazon)

Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, served as executive producer on this authorized documentary feature directed by Brett Morgen. Mike Hale wrote in his Times review in 2015, “Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — ‘art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages’ — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.”

‘One of Kurt Cobain’s Final Interviews’

In this 26-minute WatchMojo interview from 1993, filmed with the Seattle waterfront as a backdrop, Cobain was bearded and scabby, smoking one cigarette after another. He was also relaxed and thoughtful, laughing at questions about his rock-star status that on a different day would have made him bristle. He explained, “Either I’ve accepted it or I’ve gone beyond insane.”

The death of Cobain haunts Nick Hornby’s second novel, shattering some of its characters and binding some of them together. The 12-year-old Marcus tries to make sense of the news he sees plastered all over the front pages of the evening papers: “He wondered if his mum was OK, even though he knew there was no connection between his mum and Kurt Cobain because his mum was a real person and Kurt Cobain wasn’t; and then he felt confused, because the newspaper headline had turned Kurt Cobain into a real person somehow.”

This evocative 2018 science-fiction graphic novel by writer Jeremy Holt and artist Alex Diotto tells the story of a grunge band called Samsara (clearly inspired by Nirvana) and a guitar that functions as a time-travel device. The metaphor works not only because of the urge Nirvana fans have to create an alternate timeline where Cobain survived, but because recorded music is itself a time-travel device, teleporting people both to the moment when it was made and the moment when it first touched a listener’s soul.

‘Last Days’ (Streaming Services)

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant was a kindred spirit to Cobain: an independent artist from the Pacific Northwest who somehow wandered into the cultural mainstream. So it seemed natural in 2005 when he made a movie about (a thinly fictionalized version of) Cobain, played by Michael Pitt. In her Times review, Manohla Dargis called the movie a “mesmerizing dream” and said “Mr. Van Sant’s refusal to root around in Cobain’s consciousness, to try to explain why and how he created, suffered and died, is a radical gesture, both in aesthetic and in moral terms.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/arts/music/kurt-cobain-nirvana-death.html" id="6f459c94-246b-3a16-aae5-a8d1309509c0">The New York Times</a>.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27, a victim of suicide. He left behind the epochal rock music he made as the singer and guitarist for Nirvana, piles of journals and artwork, and a final note that didn’t clear up the contradictions of his short life. Which was probably how he wanted it: The previous year, he had painted on the wall of his rented Seattle home, in large red block letters, “None of You Will Ever Know My Intentions.”

Exploring Kurt Cobain, 25 Years Gone

<h1>There are three things Marc Martel says he won’t do to impersonate Freddie Mercury. He won’t wear Mercury’s trademark yellow jacket. He won’t go onstage wielding Mercury’s favored half microphone stand. And he won’t grow a full mustache.</h1>

Here’s the one thing Martel needs to do: open his mouth. Through genetics and musical aptitude, the 42-year-old singer is a vocal doppelgänger for the Queen frontman.

That’s a gift that has led Martel, formerly the leader of a Christian band in Canada, to a lucrative second career in recent years — and a prominent but invisible role in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the hit biopic nominated for five Academy Awards at the Oscars on Sunday. It’s not the life Martel planned, but it’s landed him on “American Idol” and in front of crowds of thousands worldwide. “I keep realizing how weird a situation I’m in,” Martel said in a phone interview. “I’m trying to keep a good head about it.”

Rami Malek embodies Mercury onscreen, but as he told The New York Times last year, “No one wants to hear me sing.” During the performance sequences in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the movie sometimes employs Mercury’s actual vocals from the Queen archives, but that wasn’t always practical — some scenes demanded a stunt vocal-cord performer.

The film’s creators have conceded that the sung vocals in the movie are largely by Mercury and Martel, although they haven’t broken down the specifics of who contributed what; doing so might distract from Malek’s performance.

Martel, who received a fleeting “additional vocals” billing, acknowledged that he worked on the movie but, citing his nondisclosure agreement, would not go into detail. That leaves him with a ghostly status much like that of Marni Nixon, who provided the singing voices both of Maria in the movie of “West Side Story” (for Natalie Wood) and Eliza in the movie of “My Fair Lady” (for Audrey Hepburn), without credit.

Even though Martel doesn’t get the awards-show glamour that Malek is enjoying, he’s proud of his contributions to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The first time he saw it wasn’t at a red-carpet event: He caught it in Cool Springs, Tennessee, with his wife and manager, wearing “our comfy clothes.” He had wanted to enjoy the movie as a spectator, but “I couldn’t help waiting for the next scene where I was going to hear my own voice,” he said. So the Martels bought out a movie theater showing, invited 80 of their closest friends and treated it like a party.

Martel grew up in Montreal listening to pop (George Michael was a favorite) and Christian music (his parents worked at a church as pastor and choir director). All he knew of Queen was the scene in the 1992 comedy “Wayne’s World” where the characters rock out to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in an AMC Pacer.

He started a Christian rock band called Downhere with some friends in college; in 2001, they signed a record deal and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He believes that the first person to tell him he sounded like Freddie Mercury was Downhere bassist Glenn Lavender. It was a compliment, given how Mercury was one of the great singers in rock history, possessing a pellucid tone, a three-octave range and an operatic quality that could make even paeans to bicycle riding sound emotional. But Martel didn’t initially take it as praise.

“That’s cool — I sound unoriginal,” he recalled thinking. But he checked out Queen’s greatest hits, hoping to learn something from Mercury, who died in 1991. “I never thought it would amount to anything more than a fun karaoke trick.”

In 2011, however, with Downhere having run its course after seven studio albums, Martel heard that Queen drummer Roger Taylor was putting together an authorized tribute band called the Queen Extravaganza and won a spot on vocals with an audition video of “Somebody to Love” that went viral.

Martel sounds close enough to Mercury that he can itemize the subtle differences: “I’m not British, so I don’t usually sing with an accent. I don’t have extra teeth like he did, so my S’s come out normally — his were very piercing,” he said. “But even if I don’t try to sing like Freddie Mercury, people still hear him in my voice, no matter what I do. I have this weird unique thing where I can sound like him, so why wouldn’t I?”

Martel now steadily tours with his own Ultimate Queen Celebration and also does shows with the Black Jacket Symphony and Symphonic Queen. He said the Queen catalog has made him a better singer and inspired him to take better care of his voice — while he felt comfortable backing off a high note in one of his own songs when necessary, he doesn’t like to disappoint Queen fans who expect to hear a song the way they know it from the radio.

Last year he released an album of Queen covers, “Thunderbolt &amp; Lightning,” and his YouTube covers of Queen classics have become popular enough that he finds himself recognized in public — especially outside the United States, which was never the band’s biggest market. Martel, who has concerts booked in 14 countries this year, from Ukraine to New Zealand, notes that U.S. crowds generally don’t know the arm movements and clapping that traditionally accompany “Radio Ga Ga,” while international audiences will do it without being prompted.

Although Queen has been a part of his life for nearly a decade, Martel is still figuring out “what being a tribute artist means,” he said. “For some reason, there’s a stigma around it.”

A little defensively, he cited Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and classical musicians as interpreters of other people’s work. Martel records an annual Christmas EP and still writes songs, but he doesn’t have an outlet for them; he dreams of a day when he can throw just one original into a set of Queen covers.

He recalled a recent conversation with his manager, who told him, “I’d like you to consider your songwriting the way I view my golf game — I love playing golf, but it’s not what’s paying the bills right now.” That was hard for Martel to hear, but he ultimately accepted its wisdom.

“The next five years, there’s going to be a lot of Queen,” he said, and chuckled. “But at the same time, I’m going to work on my golf game.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="286fadf0-7aa7-4c7d-90e8-eddaadb9e526" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/arts/music/marc-martel-queen-freddie-mercury-bohemian-rhapsody.html">The New York Times</a>.

Here’s the one thing Martel needs to do: open his mouth. Through genetics and musical aptitude, the 42-year-old singer is a vocal doppelgänger for the Queen frontman.

The other ghost in 'Bohemian Rhapsody'

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Gavin Edwards

Articles written by the author

Lalah Hathaway Singing for a Father Who Died Too Soon

That glitchy music video on YouTube? It's getting an upgrade

Exploring Kurt Cobain, 25 Years Gone

Exploring Kurt Cobain, 25 Years Gone

The other ghost in 'Bohemian Rhapsody'