EQC I-5 SHOWROOM
8:30 PM
AUGUST 13
Singer Michael Bolton continues to lead a successful music career, hot off the heels of his most recent release “One World One Love.” Touring in support of his 18th studio album, the long-time crooner will be making a stop at the Emerald Queen Casino for a performance featuring fan favorites new and old.
Michael Bolton began recording music in 1975. Since then, he has dabbled in a variety of styles, collaborations, and spanned musical genres. He has had eight top 10 albums, two number one singles on the Billboard charts, and awards from both the American Music Awards and Grammy Awards. He hit the high point of his commercial success in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the adult contemporary genre. He emerged in 1987 with one of his first major hits “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by soul legend Otis Redding. He also reinterpreted other soul classics by Ray Charles and Percy Sledge. In 1991, Michael Bolton released the album “Time, Love & Tenderness,” which featured his Grammy Award-winning cover version of “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
Michael Bolton also has had success as a pop songwriter, working with artists such as Conway Twitty, Barbra Streisand, Kiss, Kenny Rogers, Kenny G, Peabo Bryson and Patti LaBelle. His early songwriting collaborators included Doug James and Mark Mangold, and as his fame grew he began to co-write with higher-profile writers such as Babyface, Diane Warren and Bob Dylan.
In the late 1990s, Michael Bolton took on classical music, releasing an album of arias, which led him to singing tenor alongside the late, great Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Jose Carerras, Renee Fleming and other opera stars. All the while he was writing pop hits on his own account, as well as supplying material to a raft of other performers, including Barbra Streisand, Kiss and Cher.
In the same year he conceived a project to record an album of Frank Sinatra’s swing classics, and was approached by the hip-hop artist Kanye West, who sampled his vocals on “Maybe It’s The Power Of Love” and “Never Let Me Down” for a track with Jay-Z. For a white kid from Connecticut who set out singing lead in a 1970s metal band, Michael Bolton has covered a lot of ground.
“One big idea I grew up with was this: remain open to all genres and means of musical expression …it’s about accepting any type of music as the artist’s right or freedom of exposition,” he said.
The plan for his latest album, released September 2009, had two main objectives: craft a collection of memorably uplifting pop songs that sounded fresh without losing the classic Michael Bolton vocal signature. He collaborated with new pop and R&B artists Lady Gaga on “Murder My Heart” and Ne-Yo on “The Best” for this record.
Michael Bolton co-wrote most of the 12 songs on “One World One Love” with his various producers, writers and guests.
With the album done and mixed, the challenge now is getting out and performing. In concert, Michael Bolton sets his standards as high as those he aims for in the studio. “Working with Pavarotti, I developed a new respect for the vocal cords and muscle groups that serve the voice and which determine whether you can perform ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ and ‘Nessun Dorma’ in the same show. Party time is nowhere near my tour schedule. Everything I do is paced and disciplined to get through 70 to 80 shows per year.”
Michael Bolton performs at 8:30 p.m. Aug. 13 at Emerald Queen Casino’s I-5 Showroom.
Tickets range from $40 to $70 and can be purchased online at http://www.ticketmaster.com.
