At Long Last Luke (Music Thoughts: At Last, Luke Evans)

atlastI had the wrong idea. I knew that Luke Evans started in musical theater so I thought his first album would have songs from that genre. Or at the very least, I thought it would be an album of standards. But ‘At Last’ is mostly an album of pop covers. At first, I was a little disappointed by this, as I was expecting him to cover songs similar to ‘Gaston,’ from Beauty and the Beast. To be honest, I dismissed the album already. But I kept listening to it, and as I did, I started to like specific tracks one by one. I love the bombastic ‘Kissing You,’ and its harsh arrangement grew on me. And I know ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ from Roberta Flack’s original version, and I thought he did the song well here, infusing it with the right amount of tenderness and vulnerability. Although I never really warmed up to his versions of ‘With or Without You,’ (too much of the same) and ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ (I mean, don’t cover Cher) I appreciated that he did ‘Bring Him Home’ to at least give me a taste of his musical theater chops, though I think I would have preferred him to sing ‘Why God Why’ as I know he played Chris in the West End production of Miss Saigon.  In the end, I appreciated this album more, and respect it.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s