Aretha Franklin is apparently pretty smitten with her new album "Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics."
"I absolutely love the CD," Franklin tells Susan Whitall of The Detroit News aboard an Atlanta-bound tour bus.
"When Clive (Davis) brought me the list and the concept, I loved it and the songs. I bought many of those records. I probably bought all of them, with the exception of "Rolling in the Deep" and Sinead O'Connor (her take on Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U"), but I enjoyed "Rolling in the Deep," when the first time I watched Adele's promo video, with all those young people on the bus just having one wild time singing it. I said 'Absolutely, I want to do it, I love that melody.' "
The 10 songs on "Divas," which includes Etta James' signature song "At Last," Barbra Streisand's star-making "People," the standard "Teach Me Tonight," Alicia Keys' "No One," and the Supremes hit "You Keep Me Hangin' On" are the kind of songs that Franklin envied the first time she heard them.
"Singers will sometimes say, 'Man, I wish I'd have gotten to that song first … before the original artist,' " Franklin says. "These songs were like that."
Then there's the unauthorized biography, "Respect," by David Ritz, ghostwriter to the stars, including a 1999 memoir of Franklin's.
"There's a very trashy, trashy book on the street," Franklin tells The News. Whitall writes:
His claims about her "troubled" childhood and implications of a "sexual circus" at her father's church anger the singer.
"It's lies, lies, lies and then more lies," Franklin says. "I'm talking to a criminal attorney. If this isn't defamation, I don't know what would be, although I understand it's still hard to prove from the celebrity point of view.
"Celebrities give a lot of themselves, of their heart and soul, and time to performance and to charity. Then somebody comes out who blatantly disrespects you and attacks you, and tells a ton of lies. He even had the unmitigated gall to quote my (late) sisters (Erma and Carolyn) and brother Cecil). He has them saying things they never would say. My brother would have knocked him out."
