That’s how he wins every time”:

Roy Orbison Jnr on his late father’s legacy

In the current edition of Music Week, we take an in-depth look at how estates and labels are managing the legacies of some of music’s fallen icons.

A number of new recordings and releases surfaced in 2018 from artists who are no longer with us – ranging from full albums like Prince’s Piano & A Microphone 1983 to Michael Jackson appearing on the chorus of Drake’s Don’t Matter To Me and Lil Peep & Xxxtentacion posthumous collaboration Falling Down.

In our feature, we speak to the people behind recent releases from Chris Cornell, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison to gauge how they make business decisions when the artist in question is no longer around to ask.

One of those interviewed was Roy Orbison Jr, son of his namesake. A follow-up to 2017’s A Love So Beautiful (which has sold 291,698 copies to date according to the OCC), 2018’s Unchained Melodies was another new album by Roy Orbison with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Released via Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings –in partnership with Roy’s Boys LLC, founded by Orbison’s sons Wesley, Roy Jr and Alex – the record has performed incredibly well since its release in mid-November, selling 168,956 copies to date and remaining in the UK Top 5.

More than just a labour of love, Unchained Melodies was a labour of archival graft.

READ MORE

Roy Orbison Jr. and Producer Don Reedman appeared on BBC Breakfast, Saturday 8 December to talk about the new album, Unchained Melodies.

“…Also in the running for this Friday’s Official Number 1 is Roy Orbison. Unchained Melodies, Roy’s second posthumous collection with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is set to reach a new peak for the third week in a row, currently at Number 2…”

READ MORE

Roy Orbison Remembered

With his stupendous voice, the singer brought a wider spectrum of emotion to rock & roll

In the beginning, Rock & Roll was about sex.

The very phrase was a black euphemism for a good roll in the hay. Chuck Berry wrote three-minute odes to teenage mating rituals, and what Elvis Presley did with his hips onstage most people dared not do even behind bedroom doors. Then a quiet, thoughtful Texan named Roy Orbison came along and proved to the world that rock & roll could also be about love – the cryin’, achin’, heart-breakin’ kind, the once-in-a-lifetime, through-trouble-and-strife variety. Blessed with a rich, mellifluous voice that shivered with operatic vibrato and soared to extraordinary heights, Orbison could sing like a man on the edge of orgasmic ecstasy or on the verge of tears, sometimes in the same song. He brought to rock & roll a spectrum of emotion as wide as his octave range, and he showed not only that it was okay for a grown man to cry but also that one could find strength through sorrow. When Roy Orbison sang “Only the Lonely,” you could hear in his trembling, bittersweet tenor that he was singing for all the lonely. Suddenly, you didn’t feel so alone anymore.

READ MORE