DIE WITH A SMILE

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My cover of the beautiful 2024 hit ballad, Die With a Smile, by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, which was nominated for the 2025 Grammy Award for Song of the Year. It's the third in my trilogy of Bruno Mars covers, along with APT. (2024) and Just The Way You Are (2010).

As of this moment, Die With A Smile and APT. also happen to be the two most popular songs in the world! — they are #1 and #2 on the Billboard Global 200 Chart (for the week of February 15, 2025).

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A waltz. One of the things I like most about thus song is that it is in 3/4 time: it's a waltz! And I'm a sucker for pop songs that are waltzes. I've covered several of them: Moon River, John Denver's Annie's Song, Neil Diamond's Play Me, and Simon & Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair. And one of my own songs, Claudia, has a waltz — done in full-fledged Viennese style with violins and piano — right in the middle of the song! So pop songs that are waltzes always feel like old friends, and Die With A Smile is no exception.

What is particularly wonderful is when the lyrics to such a "waltz pop song" are crafted in such a way that the singer can really stress the first of the three beats in every measure — the "oom" in the "oom-pa-pa" — and it sounds not only natural, but really good. The lyrics to Die With A Smile are designed to perfectly mesh with the waltz time, so it is a delight for me to sing it that way, always stressing the syllable on the first of the three beats — it propels the song along, just the same way the first of the three beats in a waltz propels dancers along as they dance a waltz:

. . . If the
world was
end-ing,
I'd wanna be
next to
you-oo-oo-
oo
. . . If the
par-ty was
o-ver and
our time on
Earth was
through-oo-oo-
oo

How to deal with a lower voice. Bruno Mars has a much higher voice than me. And Lady Gaga has a higher voice than Bruno. So the first thing I did was to lower the key of the karaoke arrangement as much as the software would allow me to do — from the key of A down to the key of D, 6 notes lower. That brought Bruno's part within my normal singing range, but not Lady Gaga's. So I used a trick I've been using with the previous Bruno Mars songs I've covered: I sing Lady Gaga's parts in my falsetto voice. And in the few places where that either sounded unnatural or unnecessary (when both voices are singing), I just left her part out, since in my cover, I'm singing the song solo, rather than as a duet.