English singer Sarah Brightman will forever be remembered for her Broadway musicals, first debuting in Cats (where she met composer Andrew Lloyd Webber) and then going on to The Phantom of the Opera, leading to the biggest-selling cast album of all time.
She married and divorced Webber, moved into a solo career that made her the best selling soprano of all time with 30 million records sold and two million DVDs. She was named by Billboard "the fifth most influential and best-selling classical artists in the 2000s."
She started a film career with Repo! The Genetic Opera and formed her own production company. If those achievements weren't enough, she began training for a journey into space set for 2015.
Windy City Times talked to her about her tour that touches down in Chicago.
Windy City Times: Hi, Sarah. So you currently are calling from L.A.?
Sarah Brightman: Yes, and I live here. I am not home that often but I try and be.
WCT: You tour a lot.
Sarah Brightman: I do but it is not just the tour, it is also the promotional activities. It is the beauty and the downfall of being a global artist. You have the two effects there.
WCT: You must be excited about your new album Dreamchaser.
Sarah Brightman: I am because I am very happy about this album. It is a modern-day concept album.
WCT: It has the sweeping melodies that you are known for.
Sarah Brightman: Yes. I wanted to have the whole space thing that I have been going through for the past few years. It inspired me to do pieces that were very expansive in feeling. I wanted drama in there. When we think of the stars, the planets, and the galaxies looking upwards it brings all sorts of emotions back with us. It can be romantic or sad. We can use the looking outwards as something that helps us through bad times. There is something futuristic in it. It actually helped me to pick the pieces that I do. I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer. It was using all those adjectives to bring this together and join the dots between art, music, and poetry with space.
WCT: I noticed your website is very spacey.
Sarah Brightman: Yes, I know. [Both laugh.]
WCT: Did you make a video for "One Day Like This?"
Sarah Brightman: We just finished it.
WCT: How did it turn out?
Sarah Brightman: It was actually a hard one to do and it was interesting because there was an original version and something subliminally made me choose this one and it had the right feel for this album. What the song is about is one experience in life can actually last you a lifetime. Sometimes we lose track of the experiences that happen to us. They can be quite happy if we let them be for awhile.
I wanted to create a video where it was really about people's joys and love for each other. You know religious festivals and music festivals bring people together. There is no angst there. Everyone groups wherever they are from. I attended the Holi Festival of Love. Filmmakers and amateurs have filmed lots of stuff there. There is a holy festival in Utah and one in India as well. I collected it all up and put it all together. I drew comparisons in the video of people praying in front of the sun. The sun is coming up. Everything is incredibly positive in the video and very joyous. It was hard to put together but it came out right with the song.
WCT: Mike Hedges from U2 worked with you on this album. How did that go?
Sarah Brightman: He's been great with this particular project. I thought he would be the right person to work with because he's a very spiritual man and very rock 'n' roll at the same time. There is something very ballistic in the way he approaches things but at the same time very spiritual and soft. That is the very thing that I needed. He understood exactly what I needed to do. It was difficult to join all the dots in the music and we had to create our own sound for it. We had to take these songs in different directions. I think we managed pretty well with the feeling I needed to give out.
WCT: Let's talk about the tour. Do you sing cuts from Phantom of the Opera?
Sarah Brightman: I always do. I sing the pieces that people know me for. I love doing them because I can still hit the notes [laughs] and they can hear the different parts of my career. Whenever I do a tour and bring in all the material sometimes the sounds are different. Maybe the strings will have a slightly different sound so it ties in with the sound of the album I am releasing. It is lots of fun. The last time I had a very gothic feel to the album because that Symphony album was quite dark and gothic. Things like "Phantom of the Opera" and "Time to Say Goodbye" all had that slight sound within them. This time I should have a quite spacey "Phantom of the Opera" when I perform it live. That is fun to draw them all together into a theme.
WCT: Do you have an opening act?
Sarah Brightman: No, I don't this time.
WCT: How many languages do you speak?
Sarah Brightman: I speak a lot of languages but none of them very well, including my own, I might add!
WCT: Have you ever thought of doing Dancing With the Stars?
Sarah Brightman: I was asked if I would be interested in that many years ago. I thought about doing it for my health more than anything. I couldn't do it because the time span that you have to allot for it is actually quite a lot of time so I wasn't able to do it. That has always been the problem. It is something that I have thought about a lot. Do you think I would be good on it?
WCT: I think you would be great! I was just thinking about how well another soprano did on it (Katherine Jenkins) so I thought about you. You have a big gay following, like she does.
Sarah Brightman: It is lovely having a gay following. I have had a gay following since my late teens ,when I released a song called "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper " back in England in the '70s.
They kind of know what is going to happen before it happens in the arts. They have great taste and incredibly imaginative and open about new ideas and new things. I am in a good place with the gay following that I have.
My brother is gay and he is always telling me about all the news and what is happening in the world, which is fun.
I feel very honored to have that. It is a good thing in the arts.
WCT: I read you have your own scholarship called The Brightman STEM Scholarship. Tell me about it.
Sarah Brightman: As a woman I know what I have to go through and what what we learned is that only 20 percent of women are working in the areas of science, technology, math and engineering. I am taking a Virgin Galactic flight called Virgin Unite. There are only a few of us going up in that flight. I wanted to create a scholarship for girls to help them with their funds. There are girls now that are able to get to university that are really talented in all of these areas. Who knows they may be the next astronauts or cosmonauts? I think it is very important for our future this area because it will be a tech-y future with what we are experiencing. Everything is very technical now with the Internet and space exploration. We are going to need more people—especially women—in these areas. That is really why I wanted to start it.
WCT: You are doing more acting?
Sarah Brightman: I have done some movies, yes. I love doing them. They are not my first thing to do because I feel first and foremost that I am a musician. They do make me look at things from a different perspective. I do love working with actors.
WCT: Maybe a space movie or TV show would be good!
Sarah Brightman: [Laughs] I would like that.
Brightman lights up the Akoo Theatre in Rosemont, Ill., on Saturday, Sept. 28. Visit www.ticketmaster.com for tickets and www.sarahbrightman.com .
