Wack Wednesday: A 90-Year-Old Crooner Made a Rock Covers Album, and Got the Songwriters to Show Up

What Wack Wednesday Is

Every Wednesday, Song Reviews covers what’s strange: novelty tracks, bizarre production, genre combinations that shouldn’t work, internet phenomena, and the growing pile of edge cases pop music keeps generating faster than anyone can classify them. It’s not automatically a bad-music day – that’s Terrible Tuesday’s job. Wack Wednesday is for the songs and stories that are just weird, whether or not they’re any good.

What We’re Talking About Today

Engelbert Humperdinck – 90 years old, British, a fixture of adult-contemporary radio since “Release Me” topped charts in 1967 – released Faithfully on August 28: a full album of orchestral rock covers, drawing from KISS, Journey, the Beatles, Aerosmith, and Ozzy Osbourne, among others. Read the review of the title track, a cover of Journey’s “Faithfully”: “Faithfully” (5.8/10) – a genuinely strange but genuinely well-sung genre transplant, elevated by a guest appearance from the song’s own co-writer.

What’s Wack

• The songwriters showed up to their own reinterpretation. Jonathan Cain, who wrote “Faithfully” for Journey and still plays keyboards in the band, guests on Humperdinck’s version of his own song – the rare cover where the composer is in the room helping remake it into something the original band would never have released.
• The album leans on session royalty, not novelty. Rick Wakeman (Yes) shows up on the KISS cover “Beth.” Sonny Landreth plays on the Aerosmith cover “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” These aren’t karaoke-style covers – they’re built with players who have direct history with the source material.
• An orchestra doing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” is a genuinely odd substitution. Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmister wrote that one as a metal power ballad; hearing it rearranged for strings and a 90-year-old croon rather than an electric guitar solo changes what the song is doing almost entirely, even though the words haven’t moved.
• This isn’t an AI story, on purpose. After weeks of AI-hoax coverage on this site – River Cain’s fabricated America’s Got Talent footage, Tyga’s Pitchfork zero – Faithfully is odd for an entirely different, much older reason: an artist from one genre and generation applying his own unchanged skill set to material that was never built for it.

None of that guarantees the record is good, and reasonable listeners will split on whether Humperdinck’s orchestral treatment honors these songs or just embalms them. What isn’t in question is that it’s a genuinely strange record built with real craft and real cooperation from the people who wrote the originals – the kind of odd pairing Wack Wednesday exists to flag, no artificial intelligence required.

Hero image: “Faithfully” (2026) album cover art, courtesy of Cleopatra Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.