Will He Like Me

2018 release. PS Classics co-founder Philip Chaffin - joined by his husband and producer Tommy Krasker - reimagines the Great American Songbook for the post-marriage-equality era. Will He Like Me? weaves together nearly a century of American popular song to tell a gay man's love story: one that takes him from first date to final farewell. It reinvents 17 classic songs for the LGBTQ community by capturing them in a way they wouldn't - and couldn't - have been sung just a decade ago. The impulse is novel, but the resulting song-cycle reveals, once again, the true glory of the Great American Songbook: how it speaks to us all, evoking shared emotions and experiences that cut across gender, class, race and orientation. The song list ranges from forgotten gems ("Who Gave You Permission?" from the made-for-TV movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom; the title tune from the 1966 off-Broadway musical Man With a Load of Mischief) to much-loved standards that male vocalists, until recently, haven't been able to sing (Rodgers & Hammerstein's "When I Marry Mister Snow," the Jerome Moross-John Latouche evergreen "Windflowers"). For his fifth album, Chaffin explores the bittersweet experience of searching for love over the course of a lifetime, and finding it, and his rich baritone captures every nuance of emotion, as he reconceives the songs of a previous era for the lovers of a new one.