Bob Dylan appears on Barbra Streisand's upcoming duets album, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, and apparently their collaboration was a long time in the making.
Dylan previously said he wrote the song "Lay Lady Lay" for her to sing and had reached out about them singing together. In a new interview with The New Yorker, Babs talks about that early connection with Dylan.
"The fun thing is that we were both nineteen years old, in Greenwich Village, never met each other," she tells the mag. "I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different-color pencils, like a child’s writing: ‘Would you sing with me?’”
She adds, "I thought, What would I sing with him? How could we get together on this? I couldn’t understand it at that time."
On Streisand’s album, she and Dylan collaborate on the song "The Very Thought of You," which she calls a "wonderful" choice.
"Bob loved that song. He’s very shy, like I am. But he was wonderful to work with," she says. "I was told that he didn’t want any direction. But when I talked to him about things that I suggested, he was so pliable—he was so open to suggestions."
"Everything I heard about him just went out the window," she notes. "He stood on his feet for three hours with me. ... It was just an extraordinary three hours."
The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two will be released June 27 and is available for preorder now. In addition to Dylan, it has Babs collaborating with Paul McCartney, Sting, James Taylor and others.