Hot News: Barbra Streisand Finally Bothers to Promote an Album

Entertainment

Photograph by Douglas Gorenstein/NBC via Getty Images

Few singers have had a career as noteworthy as Barbra Streisand's. Almost all of her 34 studio albums have reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, including every single album she's released since 2003. Streisand is one of only 16 people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award. And to promote her new album Partners, she did something she hadn't done since Kennedy was president: She went on the Tonight Show.

In the days of unannounced releases, albums that double as apps, and even a U2 album delivered to unsuspecting-and sometimes disinterested- people's iTunes accounts, Barbra Streisand's Tonight Show appearance seems endearingly quaint. That's appropriate, I guess, for an album of old-fashioned duets (Elvis is one of her singing partners) made for longtime fans who are willing to pay for yet another rendition of It Had to Be You.

Still, you can tell from the way she's promoting Partners that she knows things are changing. She joined Instagram last month and has been posting behind-the-scenes pictures of the album's recording process. And on the Tonight Show, she sang with goofy, Elvis-impersonating Jimmy Fallon in what's clearly an attempt to drum up some viral Internet publicity.

Those are pretty standard moves these days, of course, and Streisand wouldn't be doing them (or anything else) if she didn't want to. She promoted 2011′s What Matters Most with a world tour but not much else. This is a woman who, after forgetting the lyrics to three of her songs in front of more than 130,000 people in 1967, didn't perform live for another 27 years. On Instagram and with Fallon, Streisand comes across as a mom who's endearingly but begrudgingly learning how to text.

Sales figures for Partners won't be out until next week, and the album has been getting mixed reviews. But if her past releases are anything to go by, you can expect to see her nestled high on the chart next week along with the likes of Maroon 5 and Jeezy.

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