‘One of the best jazz singers in the country’ (JazzFM), Sarah always lets the lyric take centre stage and is ‘the perfect storyteller’ according to Clive Davis of The Times. On her 2004 album, Something’s Gotta Give, she paired Mercer’s lyrics with Fran Landesman’s. These two friends from different generations admired each other’s work and Mercer’s slangy lyricism sits perfectly alongside Landesman’s edgy look at contemporary life. In this collection Sarah rekindles her love of Mercer’s writing alongside her husband, and Landesman’s longtime collaborator, composer and pianist Simon Wallace.
Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for some of the greatest American songs of the 20th Century – Come Rain Or Come Shine, Moon River, One For My Baby (And One More For The Road), That Old Black Magic, Skylark and Blues In The Night to name just a few. A Southern gent when sober, a mercurial Mr Hyde when not, he had originally hoped to be an actor, but moved over to singing and writing lyrics when fame did not come knocking. He was the first lyricist to write in a relaxed vernacular that caught the mood of the time in his lyrics. Still his natural ‘melancholia’ fuelled his inner demons.