Matters of the Heart

1	Storybook/Love Makes the World Go 'Round (Theme from "Carnival") 3:50
2	A Cockeyed Optimist 1:24
3	The Boy Next Door 2:10
4	It's for You/A Wonderful Guy 4:37
5	Where Love Resides 2:49
6	Shattered Illusions 3:15
7	Unexpressed 3:11
8	Not a Day Goes By 3:25
9	Playbill 3:19
10	Air That I Breathe 4:04
11	Sand and Water 3:43
12	When the World Was Young/I Never Do Anything Twice 5:40
13	I Regret Everything 2:20
14	This Moment 2:04
15	Real Emotional Girl 2:11
16	My Father/Look Mummy, No Hands 7:21
17	My Son 3:04
18	Back to Before 3:23
19	Hello, Young Lovers 1:49
20	My Best to You 3:00

Barnes & Noble

The towering legend of her bravura Evita (1979) performance scarcely prepares a listener for the varied pleasures of Patti LuPone's latest. On this outing, she moves beguilingly from Lennon and McCartney's "It's for You" to Randy Newman's "Real Emotional Girl" and Jimmy Webb's "Where Love Resides," with stops at Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cockeyed Optimist," Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's "Back to Before," and Rupert Holmes "My Son" from the forthcoming musical, "Dorian Grey," plus others along the way. In a voice that's never been sweeter or displayed so many colors before, she offers a hilarious, Piaf-esque "I Regret Everything," a feather-light "Air That I Breathe," and drama too, with Sondheim's "Not A Day Goes By." But the capper is newcomer John Bucchino's "Playbill." LuPone pours out that rich Italian sound, in a breathtaking delivery of a story that's so complete and stirring, it's sure to have you hitting the repeat button. She pretty much calls it right, closing with Gene Willadsen and Isham Jones's oldie, "My Best to You." Andrew Velez

All Music Guide

Patti LuPone has been sparing in her solo recordings, and in a sense this can actually be considered her studio debut, since her first album was a live collection that consisted largely of songs with which she was associated from her stage appearances, and her second was an Irving Berlin tribute by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra on which she was virtually a guest artist. Matters of the Heart, it's clear, is intended to serve as the basis for a new nightclub and concert act for LuPone, but it works equally well as a recording. Working with producer Scott Wittman and arranger/musical director Dick Gallagher, she has put together a well-chosen and carefully sequenced set of 20 songs following a life and its emotional experiences from youth to maturity. She began the process of picking material with the intention of avoiding show music and looking for new songs and pop tunes; she ended up with a mixture of the three. Theater composers such as Frank Wildhorn, Bob Merrill, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, Stephen Sondheim, Rupert Holmes, and Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are represented, but so are pop songwriters such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Randy Newman, and Judy Collins. Standards such as "The Boy Next Door," "A Wonderful Guy," and "Hello, Young Lovers" share space with songs well known to theater fans, such as Sondheim's "Not a Day Goes By" and "I Never Do Anything Twice," and songs familiar to singer-songwriter fans, such as Newman's "Real Emotional Girl" and Collins' "My Father." Using chamber music arrangements for piano and string quartet and placing the songs in the context of the album's story, LuPone reimagines them in a way that makes them new. But the real delights among the song selections come with the obscure titles, not all of which are by obscure songwriters. For example, the Lennon and McCartney composition "It's for You," written for Cilla Black, who took it into the U.K. Top Ten in 1964, but only a negligible chart entry in the U.S., will be new to most listeners. The truly new material, including three excellent songs by John Bucchino and two by Dillie Keane, hold their own, and "I Regret Everything," a reversal of Edith Piaf's anthem "Je Ne Regrette Rien," which LuPone sings in an exaggerated French accent, is a comic tour de force. All of the material is enhanced by the sequencing, which builds a life story from young, exuberant love to philosophical reflections and complications, sophistication and jadedness, and finally mature thoughts about children and the passage of time. The only thing better than listening to the album itself would be hearing LuPone perform it live, which is probably the idea. William Ruhlmann