Darlene Love Is Thinking of a Residency, Not Retirement

Darlene Love has been creating music since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, and her long catalog of hits, including “He’s a Rebel,” “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” and the Christmas classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” has kept her busy on the road decade after decade. But Love turns 85 on Sunday, and she’s thinking it might be time to re-imagine her approach to live shows.

“I would love to do a residency,” Love tells Rolling Stone, saying she can imagine a stripped-down setup with just her, a pianist, and a couple of background singers. “Someone talked to me about the Carlyle [hotel in New York City], and I’ve always wanted to do a Vegas residency in one of the smaller rooms. I want people to really hear my voice.”

“It’s almost like Bruce Springsteen when he did his [Broadway] show,” she continues. “He just sat there with a piano and a guitar and told stories. That’s something I would really like to do, and people would enjoy the stories. There are some stories behind those Phil Spector songs. And the [1963 Spector] Christmas album,  I could talk for an hour about that album.”

This doesn’t mean she’s never playing a standard theater again. She’s already booked several Darlene Love: Love for the Holidays shows in November and December. But 2027 is very much an open question. “It depends on my husband and me,” Love says. “He took me out of the [Broadway musical] Hairspray [in 2008]. He said, ‘Okay, Darl, that’s enough.’ Because I was in Hairspray for almost three years. And right now, I’m not sure about the traveling part because I would like to be around my family more. I have great, great children.”

Love divides her time between upstate New York, California, and Jamaica, where her husband is from. “When I go to California, it takes about three days for us to get over when we come back home, from laughing,” she says. “My jaw is hurting, and I feel very relaxed around my family and friends. I don’t have to put on airs around them. I can just be Darlene.”

If she still didn’t have her singing voice, that might be enough for her. But by some amazing miracle, she’s lost almost none of the vocal power that drew Phil Spector to her back in 1962. “God has blessed me all these years to be able to sing,” she says. “And remember, we came up during the time where everybody was smoking. They put all the people that really smoked right in front of the stage.”

Love and Spector had a very rocky relationship in the years that followed, and a bruising legal battle that left real scars, but she’s come to terms with the legacy of the very complex man. “Bruce Springsteen believes that Phil Spector started rock & roll,” Love says. “He has some wonderful things to say about him. Okay, all the bad stuff you know, but some good things happened with him too.”

Springsteen is a huge fan and admirer of Love. They’ve shared the stage many times together over the years, and she appeared alongside him in April at the American Music Honors, where she duetted with Dionne Warwick on “That’s What Friends Are For,” and again in June at the “The Songs That Shaped Us” concerts, where she belted out “River Deep, Mountain High.”

“The first time I saw Bruce, I didn’t know who he was,” Love recalls. “They didn’t call him Bruce, they called him ‘The Boss.’ And then he came to a show that I was doing in California, and I was singing ‘Hungry Heart.’ That’s one of my favorite songs by him.”

Stories like this will form the basis of a documentary about Love’s life that’s been in the works for several years, and is finally rolling. She’s not quite ready to say who has signed on as director, but she’s very excited it’s finally happening. “A lot of people started out, even before the pandemic, wanting to do a documentary,” she says. “This one wanted to do it, or that one wanted to do it, and they start off, and they hold me for a couple of years, and then all of a sudden it falls apart. And it’s hard a lot of times to get a lot of your friends to do documentaries, because they’re so busy.”

She also hopes to rope her friends into a very different kind of Christmas show at some point in the future. “I’ve always wanted to do a gigantic Christmas show, a real big one, at a 5,000-seat theater,” she says. “It could be really special if I worked with Paul Shaffer and Marc Shaiman. We could make it so beautiful, and I’d have no problem getting people to do it with me. I still have a bucket list, and that is on the top of it.”