than 50 years on calm waters.

It’s shocking to watch Streisand belt out music from the past six decades, and realize how much things — at least for her — haven’t changed. Her first album came out in 1963 — when, as she tells the audience, a “tweet was what a bird did”— right before the upheaval of the later part of that decade, and the explosion of rock and roll made crooners like her seem uncool to many, but cherished by some as steady ground to stand on in a rapidly shifting world. In some ways, she was already a symbol of nostalgia even when she was just getting started: a comforting link to an old way of doing things for squares freaked out by LSD and theBeatles; a young person that old people could still understand and who could remind the world that some essential and precious things never change.

Streisand is essentially genre-less, but her music could be best described as extremely moderate middle ground between jazz and pop. She is, most of all, misty and sentimental, singing about eternal love, the love who never loved you back, and, often, the ennui from a lost love you’ll never stop remembering. Her songs are like romance novels you find at the airport: all essentially the same, shiny on the outside, gushy on the inside, a window into a kind of burning passion that you probably do not possess in your own life because that kind of idealized passion can only exist in dreams. In other