But I can't really fault the album for this given the circumstances, and those circumstances make the fact that it was made at all nothing short of a miracle. Having this intense need for focus on the lyrics will obviously not allow for the comfort in the song that is necessary to begin improvising or bouncing off your duet partner in a more lively fashion. I saw Tony live around the time the sessions for this album would've begun and he was already pretty far gone, and judging by the promo videos he had to heavily rely on lyric sheets for these sessions. And, of course, the reason for this is obvious. In my opinion though, there was a lack of.in the moment energy and spontaneity in the duet tracks that was there in the first album. I was incredibly impressed and I hope this material will become a regular part of her repertoire moving forward as she has developed the chops for it far too well to drop it.

She has grown into an entirely natural sounding jazz singer and she absolutely shines on this album in ways she just simply didn't in the first. Now, I definitely prefer this album's song selection over the first collaboration, and I also prefer Gaga here. But this may have just been the digital mastering. Whoever mixed this seems to have been horridly sloppy. There were seemingly some strange editing moments with the backing arrangements as well.having a hard time explaining but some things just sounded off and puzzled me. In one of the final tracks, Tony's vocal line had a slight.atmospheric 'hiss' (this is the wrong word) and it wasn't this that was problematic, it was the fact that you could clearly hear them cutting in and out of his vocal take because the 'hiss' sound would just disappear, then cut in with his voice, then cut back out. Tony's vocals going thru some 'sweetening' were not very well covered up, and to me his vocal was almost too dry because there were times it sounded like it was cutting from take to take to make up a phrase, and it made it sound very.'artificial' I suppose. My ears could be imagining things, but there were countless times where it sounded like there were horridly obvious cutting between takes, mainly with Tony's vocal lines. I'll quickly go over what were actual negatives for me-the mix, at least on the digital version, seems to be pretty appalling at times. I've had a hard time gathering my thoughts on the album, everything around Tony lately has been intensely emotional for me and it's been a lot to take in.

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