Amy’s performance of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ click ‘READ MORE’ to listen

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I love being in the recording studio and creating this recording was no exception.

’Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ is an iconic song, it’s been recorded and performed by the best of the best over the years and it’s a very special song to me.

Having played the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz in theatre productions in my 20’s (The Bolton Octagon and later The Lowry in Salford), I’ve been lucky enough to sing this song live in performance hundreds of times. I wanted to give a fresh perspective to this new version, the feeling of a lullaby being sung to a young child for I feel the song certainly contains within it a sense of comfort and hope.

Written in 1938 by Harold Arlen and lyricist Yip Harburg ’Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ is arguably one of the most famous songs of all time and it always surprises me to remember that they actually took this song out of the film at one point as they thought it slowed the pace down too much!

“He honestly believed that these songs were given to him,” Walter Rimler (writer of Harold Arlen autobiography) says. “It was his job, once the main idea came, to work hard on them, to make them as good as he could. But the initial idea, he believed, came from some other place.”

I always try to sing everything straight from the heart, it is a song that will always be full of emotion and the hope of something better to come.

Perhaps Yip Harberg put it best himself:

 “We worked for in our songs a sort of better world, a rainbow world,” he once said. “Now, my generation unfortunately never succeed in making that rainbow world, so we can’t hand it down to you. But we could hand down our songs, which still hang on to hope and laughter… in times of confusion.”

‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow” released on the Sony album ‘I’ll Remember You’ – The D-Day Darlings 2018.