Following Love is the Answer, Barbra Streisand’s last 15 years as a recording artist have been unremarkable. She has released just four studio albums during that time, along with several live albums.

2011’s What Matters Most was a tribute to the songs of her friends, lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. In 2014, Partners was a collection of duets with male singers. That album did well enough to spawn 2016’s Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, which found Streisand singing show tunes with such unlikely collaborators as Melissa McCarthy, Antonio Banderas, and Alec Baldwin.

Finally, Streisand’s most recent studio album is 2018’s Walls, a political album released as a response to the presidency of Donald Trump. It’s well-meaning, but very cringey.

My final song selection is a track from Partners, an album that showcases Streisand’s interest in doing whatever the hell she wants. On Partners, she sounds as comfortable teaming up with Blake Shelton and Babyface as she does with Michael Buble and Josh Groban.

How about a duet on ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ with John Mayer? That’s what the Babs Mad Libs cooked up for today’s SOTD.

That closes out my Shallow Dive of Barbra Streisand. What an extraordinary career, especially when you consider that the 36 studio albums I sped through are just a tiny slice of her output. She has released dozens of live albums, compilations, and soundtracks, and that’s to say nothing of her work as an actress, producer, and director.

I’m really glad I took the time to explore a catalog with which I was only tangentially familiar, so I could appreciate why she is one of the few artists who truly earns the labels ‘icon’ and ‘legend.’