Judy Whitmore - Come Fly With Me (2024)

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Judy Whitmore - Come Fly With Me (2024)

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Vocalist, pilot, and best-selling author Judy Whitmore introduces her rendition of “Come Fly With Me,” the title track from her upcoming album, slated for release in 2024.

“Come Fly With Me” integrates two of Judy’s greatest passions: traveling the world and continuing the legacy of the Great American Songbook. Recorded with a full orchestra at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, the forthcoming album reveals a lavish elegance, immediately enveloping the listener in its lush, soaring surfaces.

Over the course of 12 gorgeously orchestrated tracks, the Southern California-based vocalist’s third album offers up a musical travelogue, bringing her beguiling voice to timeless songs set in far-flung places across the globe.

Informed by the lifelong wanderlust that’s found her climbing the Great Wall of China and taking in the running of the bulls in Spain, the album draws from Whitmore’s decades of experience as a jet pilot—a journey that began thanks in part to her former neighbor, famed folk singer John Denver. The result: a body of work as transportive, illuminating, and endlessly enchanting as travel itself.

Produced, arranged, and conducted by seven-time Grammy®-nominated composer Chris Walden, “Come Fly With Me” showcases the sophisticated yet ineffably warm vocal work Whitmore has brought to the stage at such historic venues as Carnegie Hall.

Working with her longtime vocal coach/mentor Peisha McPhee and pianist Josh Nelson, the album encompasses everything from jazz standards to traditional pop classics to early R&B ballads.

“Come Fly With Me” opens on a soft, gleaming piano topped by Whitmore’s evocative vocals, at once velvety and deliciously alluring. Graceful strings infuse the melody with sumptuous textures, adding to the gliding sensation of the song. The sparkling piano takes over in the solo section, followed by the re-entrance of Whitmore’s luxurious voice.

No matter what mood she’s inhabiting, each track she sings spotlights the innate musicality Whitmore first discovered as a little girl growing up in Studio City, California. Named after Judy Garland (a friend of her grandfather, who played violin in the MGM Studio Orchestra,) Judy’s first foray into the music business by singing in a Mamas & the Papas-inspired band formed by Capitol Records. Although she’d begun to cultivate a promising career in music, Whitmore’s life soon led her in entirely different directions. After marrying young and having two children, like so many, Judy had to put her dreams on hold. From there, her family moved to Aspen, Colorado, where their closest neighbors were Annie and John Denver who coaxed Judy into confronting her fear of flying by inviting her to board their private plane, Windstar One. Not long after that first flight, Whitmore was determined to conquer her fear and earned her commercial pilot’s license and later began working search-and-rescue missions in the Rocky Mountains—an experience that ultimately inspired her debut novel Come Fly with Me, a 2013 romantic-adventure title that hit #1 on the Amazon Kindle Bestseller List. Also working as a theater producer and a clinical psychologist, despite having achieved tremendous success in such disparate fields, Whitmore still felt that something was undeniably missing in her life. Once again demonstrating her boundless determination, in 2014 she took her first step toward realizing her deepest lifelong dream by co-founding Act Three (a cabaret group whose journey to Carnegie Hall was chronicled in the award-winning documentary film Once Upon a Dream). A truly unstoppable creative force, within several years, she’d struck out on her own and started performing solo shows around Southern California and also joined the board of directors for the Pacific Symphony, and currently serves on the executive committee for the world-renowned orchestra.