Announcing With Every Breath I Take: Cécile McLorin Salvant with the Metropole Orkest, arranged by Darcy James Argue

I’m delighted to announce that With Every Breath I Take, a new album featuring my orchestral arrangements of Cecile McLorin Salvant’s desert island ballads, performed by the Metropole Orkest and conducted by Jules Buckley, will be out on Nonesuch Records on June 26.

This project is the culmination of several lifelong dreams: my first release as an arranger, my first orchestral recording — and with the Metropole, no less! — and my first album-length collaboration with Cécile to make it out into the world.

This album was a real labor of love for everyone involved. Cécile says, “I did not choose these songs because they are beautiful, but because they are crucial to me” and I feel the same: being able to tailor immortal songs like Michel Legrand’s “Les Parapluies de Cherboug,” Brecht and Weill’s “Barbara Song,” and Sondheim’s “Being Alive” for Cécile, to drape the orchestra around her singular voice and interpretive genius… it’s a full-body thrill.

The first single just dropped, and it’s the title track: Cy Coleman and David Zippel’s “With Every Breath I Take,” from their 1989 musical City of Angels: