It's been more than half a dozen years since Glen Campbell succumbed to the cruel effects of Alzheimer's disease, but the singer-songwriter will be back on record store shelves again in the very near future, thanks to a new LP that takes material from Campbell's 2011 album Ghost on the Canvas and - with the help of a variety of other musical artists - turns it into a new record called Duets: Ghost on the Canvas Sessions.
Scheduled for release on April 19, it's an album whose origins actually stretch back to the early part of the decade, when Dave Kaplan - the man behind Surfdog Records, the label which originally released Ghost on the Canvas - was contemplating how to draw attention to the LP as its 10th anniversary was approaching. Yes, that anniversary has obviously come and gone, but in fairness to Kaplan, the idea that he came up with was one that took a little longer to put together than he'd planned, and the star power that he managed to corral for the resulting album is almost certainly more substantial than anything he'd anticipated when he first started working on it.
The predominant source of inspiration came from Unforgettable, the album of posthumous duets done by Natalie Cole with her late father, Nat King Cole.
“I loved what she had done with her father where they took old vocals [and paired them with her voice],” Kaplan told Rolling Stone. “And I just thought, ‘What would that be like if we had the crème de la crème of music icons singing with Glen?’”
The end result involved a diverse collection of artists taking the tracks from Ghost on the Canvas and not only turning them into duets with Campbell, but in some cases adding their own musical contributions to the songs as well.
Thus far, the collaborations that have been announced include Dolly Parton (“A Better Place”), Sting (“Ghost on the Canvas”), Eric Clapton (“Nothing But the Whole Wide World”), Eric Church (“Hold Out Hope”), Brian Wilson (“Strong”), Carole King (“There’s No Me...Without You”), and Elton John (“I’m Not Gonna Miss You”), which – although it doesn’t feature on Ghost on the Canvas – was released immediately thereafter on the soundtrack to the Campbell documentary, I’ll Be Me.
Others who participated in the album include Daryl Hall and Dave Stewart, Linda Perry, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star fame, Brian Setzer, and X, but it has not yet been announced to which songs they contributed.
Although Stereogum has already begun the process of dismissing the album, referring to its contents as "Frankensteined-together team-ups," the fact that a good chunk of the artists have made a point of offering up their own musical contributions in addition to their vocal contributions makes it sound substantially better than the unabashed cash-grab that it otherwise could've been. At present, this sounds much more like an effort to pay legitimate tribute to Campbell and his final studio effort, which is why Q is currently rather intrigued to hear the final product.
