William Shatner Has A New Blues Album

Better known as Captain Kirk, Shatner is not new to singing.

William Shatner In New Cartoon Music Video

William Shatner is singing the blues. His Star Trek co-stars would cite the irony here as they have maintained that Shatner made them sing the blues over the years.

Most known for playing Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek, William Shatner grew up in a Jewish family in Montreal. But after the original show went off the air the actor tried his turn at singing, appearing frequently on TV variety shows. But with the success of the Star Trek movie franchise starting in 1979, he stuck to acting for the next four decades.

Here you can see William Shatner perform Elton John classic Rocket Man at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards. The performance is a great example of his feature “talk-singing” style.

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His new album is called simply “The Blues.” On it Shatner gets help from famed guitarists Albert Lee, Steve Cropper, Ritchie Blackmore, Sonny Landreth, Brad Paisley, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Pat Travers.

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“I know! I know!” William Shatner told Variety in a phone interview about the new song and album. “As you point out, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, you can’t go further than that; you had to go under that. But it’s a fun song, and done in this way (with the video), it’s got great humor, I think, where the guy is screaming his mind out and. of course, nobody hears. …I said to the animator, here’s what I was thinking when I was getting ready to do the song: I see this guy lusting over the barmaid in a small, smokey bar and he he’s totally nuts about her, and she never hears him, of course — it’s all in his own head. And he just did it superbly.”

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