Seth MacFarlane’s next project: delving into one classic collection of songs and giving them a different kind of classic treatment. On his new album Seth MacFarlane Sings The Muppets, the award-winning entertainer will take a spin through the Jim Henson universe, performing tunes from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and the various Muppet movies with orchestral arrangements in the style of vocal jazz’s greatest crooners. The album will be out Sept. 18 on Verve Records/Republic Records and is available for pre-order now.
Seth MacFarlane Sings The Muppets mostly comprises songs from the classic Muppet films The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. The tracklist is rounded out by favorites from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Originally written by Joe Raposo, Paul Williams, and Jeff Moss, songs such as “Together Again” and “Rainbow Connection” have been given fresh life via orchestrations by Andrew Cottee, starting with Kermit the Frog’s signature song “Bein’ Green,” out now as the album’s lead single. It’s MacFarlane’s contribution to a long history of “Bein’ Green” covers by artists including Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, and Van Morrison.
“Songs from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and the Muppet films became bona fide standards,” MacFarlane says. “My friend and the arranger of this album, Andrew Cottee, and I are contemporaries, and we both had fond memories of all those great Muppet songs from that era. We both loved the idea of creating an album in which we selected our favorites and recorded them in the style that might have come out of orchestrators like Nelson Riddle and Billy May, had these songs existed in the golden era of arranging.”
“The music of The Muppets was an obvious choice for a new recording project with Seth,” Cottee adds. “The whole process of selecting the songs, arranging, recording and hearing the full mixes was a joy, and I hope that comes across to everyone who listens to this album.”
MacFarlane’s Muppets caper follows last year’s Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements, a collection of 12 songs Frank Sinatra intended to perform but never did, sourced from Ol’ Blue Eyes’ personal archive.
