Those Were the Days 2 is Shwekey and his team’s interpretation of the original songs
“When Yaakov proposed the first Those Were the Days album, I wasn’t so sure a nostalgia album would take off,” says Yaakov Shwekey’s coproducer, Yitzy Waldner. Waldner admits that they even pushed off the project for a while. “When we finally sat down to talk about it, he wanted to do a double album, paying tribute to the music he grew up with. I shrugged and said, ‘Much too long.’ ”
Once Waldner was finally ready to work on the concept, both he and Shwekey knew they wanted to do medleys of nostalgic songs, but really take the music up a notch. Older listeners can enjoy the memories evoked by these classics, but to many younger ones, the songs are new, so they need to have the appeal of expansive, ambitious arrangements.
Three years after Those Were the Days came out, Waldner looks back with some disbelief at its popularity. “Thousands of people purchased this album — more copies sold than some other artists sell of an all-new album. People have told me it’s one of their all-time favorites.”
Still, selecting the songs, rearranging them as part of a medley, and remixing them had been a lot of work, and deep down, Waldner was hoping that Yaakov Shwekey would not want to release another nostalgia album soon. But then he did.
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