The classic 1972 song Bill Murray ruins every time he sings it: “I like to butcher that one”
Every time an actor announces that they’re taking time away from the screen to focus on their music, you can almost hear eyes rolling around the world. Bill Murray has always been cut from a different cloth, though, so he hasn’t gone about it in the usual way.
Far too many actors who were under the mistaken impression that they could hold a tune have stepped into the recording booth to embarrassing, disastrous results, but Murray opted to take a different approach, avoiding albums almost entirely to tour the world under several different guises instead.
While he has technically released a studio album, his 2017 collaboration with Jan Vogler, New Worlds, was billed as an “unexpected and enchanting exploration of the intersection of music and literature,” with the duo’s record that combines classical music with spoken-word performances of literary and poetic works.
Bruce Willis’ The Return of Bruno, it was not, and you could almost say that it’s perfectly on-brand for the eccentric comedy icon to find his musical muse in a classical cellist, and more recently, they added violinist Mira Wang to their collective for another tour, providing a fresh, even more idiosyncratic twist.
Murray is also a bit of a rocker, too, with the Saturday Night Live veteran fronting Blood Brothers, the band he formed alongside Mike Zito and Albert Castiglia, and as anyone who’s been following his career for decades knows, he’s been singing onscreen since the 1970s, with Nick the Lounge Singer one of his most famous creations.
“By myself, in the shower, I’m just as good as anyone else in the shower,” Murray said, something we can all identify with. “Well, better than some, maybe!” He wouldn’t be foolish enough to call himself a top-level crooner, mostly because he’s not, but there’s one song he should have stopped singing a long time ago, since he’s the first to admit that he murders it every time.
Jane Pauley, a veteran TV host who’s known Murray since the ’70s, let the cat out of the bag, offering what barely even constitutes a backhanded compliment of his abilities. “Soon, you’ll be in Carnegie Hall,” she told him. “But that crowd… Bill Murray can sing. And I’m thinking, ‘Well, they’ve never heard him sing ‘Brandy.'”
“They’ve never heard me ruin a lot of songs,” he countered. Still, he holds a special place in his heart for taking Looking Glass’ number one 1972 single, ‘Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)’, which he’ll put through the vocal meat grinder, and he couldn’t care less how much his reliably awful renditions might offend anyone within earshot.
“Now, I can’t even do it as badly as I usually do it because I’m with you,” Murray informed Pauley. “I like to butcher that one.” Belting out ‘Brandy’ has become one of the Academy Award nominee’s recurring bits; he’s been known to sing it at parties, he’s been known to crash live performances for an impromptu performance, and he even sang it alongside Clint Eastwood at a golf tournament in 2012, but he’s never gotten any better at it.
