Dionne Warwick's "My Friends & Me"

On her latest release, the legendary Dionne Warwick follows in the recent footsteps of fellow R&B divas Gladys Knight and Natalie Cole in making an album that reaches into the past.
Dionne's My Friends & Me is a collection of pop standards (most of them co-written by Burt Bacharach) covered by Dionne and a variety of female singers, including Kelis, Gladys Knight and Mya. As with any project like this, the quality of the collaborations varies from track to track, but despite the plethora of singers featured, the project has a consistent feel to it.

Earlier this year, Gladys Knight recently released Before Me, a collection of songs originally recorded before Gladys was a star; and Natalie Cole released Leavin,' consisting of covers of songs by Fiona Apple, Sting, Kate Bush and other pop singers. The Gladys album was fairly good, but the Natalie Cole one was wretched. Fortunately, Dionne Warwick's release is closer in quality to the Gladys album.

Although there's nothing particularly groundbreaking, anyone old enough to remember these songs from when they were first popular will likely feel a fond sense of nostalgia hearing them in this updated format.

There's no radical song rearrangements here and no bad singing (although Cheyenne Elliot's vocals on "Love Will Find A Way" are pretty flat). In fact, there's just two songs that are significantly different from the original, one being a cover of Burt Bacharach's "The Windows of the World," which is made unusual only by a rap performance by Da Brat.

The other rearranged song is a Salsa version of Dionne's hit "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," which features the late, great Celia Cruz. The song, one of the last ever recorded by Cruz (and one of her few collaborations with an American artist), was originally released before Celia died in 2003.

Of the performances by R&B artists on the album, the weakest effort is turned in by Mya, who's practically a non-entity on a cover of "Close To You." But the strongest effort by an R&B artist is a surprise: the usually erratic Kelis, whose strong, focused vocals on "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" are a highlight of the album.