And Tommy replied, sincerely, “I wouldn’t know how to answer that,” and the composer said, “Oh, I see, it’s sort of like asking a parent to pick a favorite child.” And we answered, no, it’s not like that. It’s just that – we struggled to explain – we never take on any projects that we don’t feel passionately about, and we don’t release any CD’s that we’re not proud of. (It came off much better in person, because no one noticed we were ending every phrase with a preposition.) So there’s no easy way to define which projects we like “best.” If we didn’t love them, we wouldn’t record them; if we weren’t happy with the results, we wouldn’t release them.

The query “Which do you like best” reminded us of other questions we get asked frequently, ones we never know how to answer. Philip’s favorite is when he tells someone we’re recording a show, and they ask, “Did you like it?” Did we like it? – well, that’s pretty much the first consideration. If we didn’t like it, if we didn’t “respond,” why record it? Cast albums are brutal affairs: the creative insanity of pre-production, the pressures of recording in (typically) one day, the rush to get final product into stores while interest is high. (And during that time, you live with those songs day and night; they underscore your dreams.) Why take on something we didn’t like? The financial considerations have always come second – they have to: who can predict anything in this business? (Or at least, we’ve never been very good at it!) Sometimes our choices pay off; occasionally, happily, they pay off handsomely. We had no idea when we elected to release GrooveLily’s Striking 12 in 2004 that it would someday play an extended run in the East Village; we never imagined when we chose to record Grey Gardens and Sunday in the Park With George that both would wind up on Broadway.

Our current crop of cast albums includes Xanadu, A Catered Affair and Adding Machine: three wildly different shows that probably define our varied tastes as well as any three we could name. We were exhilarated by Xanadu, deeply moved by A Catered Affair (Philip will freely admit he cried at the final orchestra rehearsal, when the cast – for the first time – sang with the band), and struck dumb by the genius that is Adding Machine. We couldn’t be more pleased that all three producers gave us the chance to preserve their shows on disc, and we couldn’t be more proud of the results.

Tommy’s favorite question comes when he tells someone we’re recording an artist’s new solo album, and friends ask, “What’s it about?” “About,” as in, what’s the concept? And the answer is invariably, “it’s about the artist” – and then people look at Tommy as if to say, “Are you being sarcastic?” And the answer is no. We tend to do a lot of solo albums where the only connective thread is the artist themselves: what material moves them, and how they respond to it. Over four years ago, a reviewer wrote of Rebecca Luker’s Leaving Home: “PS Classics seems to have allowed the artist’s wishes to come to life, making it a compelling and personal recording.” We thought that was one of the nicest things that had ever been said about us, that we’d “allowed the artist’s wishes to come to life”; we wrote the reviewer a fan letter.

Interestingly, the three solo albums we’ve just released – Maureen McGovern’s A Long and Winding Road, Kerry Butler’s Faith, Trust & Pixie Dust, and Capathia Jenkins and Louis Rosen’s One Ounce of Truth – all celebrate particular song catalogs, they all have fairly tightly-defined “concepts,” and that’s pretty rare for us. But in all cases, there’s nothing arbitrary about the pairing of artist and repertoire. All the singers had profound connections to the material they chose. For Maureen, it meant revisiting the songs that influenced and inspired her own career as an artist; for Kerry, it meant expressing a love of all things Disney (her admitted obsession) in personal terms; for Capathia and Louis, it meant giving vivid musical life to the eloquent poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Maureen performed three songs for us last December, in a rehearsal room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and we were so overwhelmed, we greenlighted the album on the spot. (The first song she sang was James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” and it was breathtaking; you might say she pretty much had us at hello.) Capathia and Louie came to our offices, performed a handful of selections, and our response was as immediate and as enthusiastic. (We’d never heard anything quite like it: soulful and sexy and memorable; how do you not record it?) Kerry went the 21st century route: she and her music director Michael Kosarin did a dozen work-sessions, then E-mailed us five mp3’s that suggested the material, the style and an approach that suited Kerry to a “T.” We were hooked.

Adding Machine, our final release of the spring, streets on June 3rd, and then we’re taking a little time off: to refuel, to re-energize, and to finalize our next set of releases. In the meantime, we leave you with what we consider to be five glorious new recordings.

Do we like them? In the words of Phyllis Rogers Stone, bet your ass.

          — Tommy Krasker & Philip Chaffin, May 2008

Tommy Krasker, Executive Producer for PS Classics, can be reached at tkrasker@psclassics.com. Philip Chaffin, A&R Director, can be reached at pchaffin@psclassics.com.