In 1984, Barry Manilow broke his own mold with the album 2:00 AM Paradise Café. After a decade of pop albums, he decided to try his hand at an album of songs that you might have heard at a late night jazz cafe. Including duets with Sarah Vaughan and Mel Torme, the album was a critical success, and sold enough to go platinum.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Manilow has revealed that he wants to go back and do a follow-up to the album.
Yeah, I think I'm gonna tackle a Volume 2 of 2:00 A.M. Paradise Café. That was another original album that was very a important experience for me, and it was very well received. I don't know whether I'll match that first Paradise Café album – that's heavy competition. But I'm gonna tackle it and if I make it, that's going to be a very rewarding project.
Barry recently played a couple of shows in Illinois to dust off the cobwebs, but they weren't the easiest things to do after his recent major surgery. He commented:
I was able to get through six shows. As soon as I'd finish, the curtain would close and I'd fall back into a wheelchair and they'd wheel me back into a dressing room. I'm not ready to do this yet, but I did it. I got through it and I'm better than I was three weeks ago. Everybody thinks I had some sort of a hip replacement; that wasn't it. I had ripped the muscles off my hip on both sides and they had to pull them back and nail them back into my hips. So that kind of surgery, which was supposed to take two hours, took seven hours. It was major surgery and it's a long recovery period. I don't know how I got through those six (shows), but I just couldn't cancel it.
