Later, the Bergmans and Legrand reworked the ending on another song written for the Life Cycle of a Woman album and Barbra recorded it for her 1999 album A Love Like Ours. The song was “Wait” and Alan Bergman confirmed, “We changed the ending from the original years ago.”
Again, to the Times, Barbra Streisand explained that back in the 1970s “I don’t think Michel, Marilyn and Alan had fully mapped out their concept yet, except for the basic ‘womb to tomb’ idea,” she said.
“The only two songs I didn’t relate to musically or lyrically, at the time,” she added, “were about birth and death. They didn’t want to change them, and then we all became involved in other projects, so the idea lost momentum.”
Legrand was passionate about the concept as he explained the genesis of it to the BBC in a 2003 radio interview. “One day when I started to work with Alan and Marilyn Bergman, one day I said – because, you know I’d been doing orchestrations for Barbra – I said, ‘Why don’t we write for Barbra a concept album? For instance, what about the idea of the life of someone, a woman? So she’ll be born, baby, young, teenager, first love, marriage, mother, grandmother, and dead. So why don’t we write a cycle of twelve, fourteen songs?’ So, they loved that idea very much and we wrote it together. The first song is one note, one syllable. Then you wait a few seconds, another syllable. It’s like the heart starting to beat. Two syllables. Three. Four. First phrase. This is exactly the contrary phrase, shorter, shorter. Four syllables. The way people are born and die. At the end, three then two, one, nothing.”
Ultimately, over the years, Streisand, the Bergmans and Michel Legrand recorded only four songs for this project. “For a variety of reasons, we all became involved in other projects and the idea lost momentum,” Streisand stated in 1999. She has also admitted to feeling “musically restless” during that period of her recording career, which could explain why, in the span of just a few years, Barbra recorded pop songs like “Stoney End,” and also dabbled in German lieder as well as Broadway standards.
