Melissa Errico "Hurry Home"

Every great songwriter needs great interpreters. With the special digital release of her new single “Hurry Home” by Ghostlight Records, Melissa Errico returns to her role as what The Wall Street Journal has called the most “spectacularly beautiful” of all interpreters of acclaimed French composer and songwriter, the multiple-Oscar-winning Michel Legrand. Melissa first collaborated with Michel when she earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance in Legrand’s Broadway musical Amour. She then made with him the classic album Legrand Affair, backed by Legrand conducting his own large scale orchestral arrangements with the Brussels Philharmonic, produced by Phil Ramone.

For this newly recorded song -- originally written for Jerry Lewis’ last movie Max Rose, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman (“Windmills of Your Mind,” “You Must Believe in Spring”) -- she chose an acoustic, intimate, jazz-inflected setting. Using a small band arranged by producer/arranger Rob Mathes (Sting, Elton John, Yo Yo Ma), and featuring guitarist & frequent Errico sideman Ben Butler, the song tells of love in a long marriage, and offers a more universal call to gathering and coming together.

“I didn’t think of it at first as a seasonal song,” Errico says of this composition, the second that Legrand has written specially for her. “But hearing it in my mind again and again, I see how much it is about summoning us all back together; it’s a song about the endurance of a relationship, and the hunger we all have for a moment of longed-for (and lost) togetherness. We all dream of hurrying home to someone, or of having that one-person hurry home to us.” The beauty and emotion of the song was captured visually for this single release with an intimate black & white portrait of Melissa by renowned French photographer Brigitte Lacombe.

Errico, whose recent concert performances of the music of Stephen Sondheim have been praised for her “silky smooth voice & the lightning speed vibrato that seems to make the entire room quiver with delight” has always held onto an enduring love and deep reverence for Legrand’s music, possessed as it is by a poignant French lyricism that matches her own plaintive American kind. “Hurry Home” takes its place as one of the most beautiful melodies of the more than 60-year career of a legendary composer, and one more occasion for his favorite singer to shine.