For reasons known only to him, Ridgway decided to perform and record an album of big band standards in 1998.  If I remember correctly, The Way I Feel Today originally had a very limited pressing and was only made available at live shows, and as such, became a sought after collector's item among fans.  In fact, I very nearly paid over $80 for a copy on eBay, but got sniped at the very end.

Thankfully it's a bit more readily available now.  Which is good, because this was not some random offshoot project done to kill time - Stan really did an amazing job with these songs.  Remember, he's not performing them in his own style, he had an actual honest-to-godliness big band backing him.  But there's no queasy or uncomfortable karaoke-from-hell vibe at all.  He sings these all-too familiar tunes like he owns them, and one of the very best examples is a song that the now late Robert Goulet helped make famous - "The Impossible Dream."

Click here to visit Stan's MySpace page, which for a spell, had "The Impossible Dream" on it.  UPDATE:  Crap, they took the song down already.  Oh well.

This is part of a week-long series on the music of Stan Ridgway.