Barbra Streisand finds 'The Secret of Life' on her new duets album with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney

Barbra Streisand was worried.

She had just spent six days a week for six weeks recording the audiobook version of her 2023 memoir “My Name is Barbra” — which became more than 48 hours of discussing her storied, EGOT-winning career and the unexpected life that came with it. But now, it was time to record a new album with a stunning lineup of duet partners that ranged from current hitmakers Hozier and Sam Smith to legends Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and James Taylor. And when producers played the songs for her, she couldn’t sing along. Her mighty voice would just squeak.

“My voice was shot,” Streisand, 83, told The Associated Press, calling from her home in Malibu, California. “I mean, I literally prayed to God in front of that microphone, ‘Let my voice be there for me.’ And I don’t know how, but it was there.”

Fans will be able to hear that for themselves on Friday, when her album “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2” arrives in stores and on streaming services. And despite her misgivings, Streisand shows she can still deliver the performances she wants, while also coaxing them out of others.

Her duet with Dylan had been decades in the making. In 1970, Dylan sent Streisand a bouquet of flowers and a note — written in what she believes was crayon — asking, “Would you sing with me?”

But they did not connect until decades later, when their styles had converged a bit. When Streisand started work on her new album, she sent Dylan a copy of her memoir with an inscription referring to their time separately performing in Greenwich Village as teenagers and hoping it was time to finally sing together.

Choosing to rework the Ray Noble standard “The Very Thought of You” — popularized by everyone from Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald — turned out to be a surprise. It's not one of her personal favorites, though it is her longtime manager Marty Erlichman’s favorite song.

Dylan, one of the most revered songwriters in music history, only wanted to sing a standard, not one of his own classics. “Isn’t that great?” Streisand said. “I would’ve sung anything with him.”

She also agreed to his request to keep everyone else out of the studio when they recorded — including Streisand’s husband, James Brolin, who often goes to her sessions.

“I had heard he wrote ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ for me,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Let’s make this lush, romantic track.’”

Though Dylan has a reputation for not taking much direction from producers, Streisand said he was very receptive to her suggestions.

“He was totally open to ‘Why don’t you maybe try this?’ or ‘Phrase it this way’ or ‘Try something else’ — just like I do as a director in movies and he was my actor that day,” she said. “To capture his originality and his voice and his phrasing, it was just an exciting experience.”

Her experience with McCartney was more daunting. There was a full film crew on hand, led by Oscar-winning director Frank Marshall, to capture the recording of two of the world's most successful artists for an upcoming documentary on Streisand's life. Streisand said that added to the challenges of the session.

“He was kind of shy about it and I understand him,” she said about recording “My Valentine” with McCartney. “I walked into a room of 25 people (to sing) and I don’t like that.”

McCartney told his website he was “terrified” during the three-hour session.

“I thought, ‘Well, this will be easy because it’s my song, it’s “My Valentine.” What can go wrong?’” he said. “But what I’d forgotten was that they’d arranged it so that it had to go in Barbra’s key and then in my key. So, to get from Barbra’s key into mine was kind of difficult. ... It wasn’t easy at all!”

They quickly worked it out. “It turned out great,” said Streisand, who released the song in May as one of the album’s preview singles.

It’s another single, though, that is resonating even more. “Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self,” Streisand’s duet with Icelandic singer-songwriter Laufey, hit No. 1 on the iTunes chart earlier this month, topping Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” and Mariah Carey’s “Type Dangerous” on release day.

Streisand related to the song because it reminded her of a middle-school report she wrote called “My Thirteen Years,” which meant so much to her that she still has it. In neat, cursive writing, she recalled what her life was like, her love of Shakespearean sonnets and the death of her father, Emanuel. “I was too young to realize what had happened,” she writes in the report.

It was at age 13 that Streisand also made her first record, when her mother brought her to Nola Studios in Manhattan to record “You’ll Never Know” and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.”

“When I was 13, that’s a very distinguished year in my life,” Streisand said. “So I hear this song … and it really hit me.”

She worked with Laufey to turn the original, which Laufey sang solo, into a duet. They settled on Laufey singing as the 13-year-old and Streisand as her mother. Streisand said she was “absolutely thrilled” with how it turned out and how fans have responded to it.

Sure, duet success is nothing new to Streisand, who has topped the charts with Neil Diamond on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” and Donna Summer on “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” and a string of albums including “Duets,” “Partners” and “Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway.”

But “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2” is different. Streisand said her worries about the world and President Donald Trump’s second administration may have subconsciously contributed to her selection of some of the album’s more serious tracks — like Sting’s “Fragile” and her reworking of “Love Will Survive” from last year’s “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” series into a duet with Seal.

“I’d like to be happier,” Streisand said. “But every time I turn on the television — and I’m a glutton for punishment, obviously — I’m fascinated and horrified at the same time, you know?”

At a recent dinner with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Streisand said he described the current state of Washington as “created chaos, corruption and cruelty.”

Streisand added, “I thought, ‘That kind of sums him (Trump) up.’”

However, Streisand, who has retired from touring, said she does plan to work on achieving the goal she set out in her memoir: To enjoy life more. “The Secret of Life” — named from the James Taylor classic, as well as a children’s book she reads her grandchildren — has sparked thoughts about what enriches her life.

“The secret of life is spending time with people you love,” she said, adding she plans to release a string of photos of her and her “secrets,” including her husband, her son Jason Gould, and other friends, family and, of course, dogs.

Streisand is in her “stop and smell the roses” era.

“I’m getting older by the day, by the minute, and you have to take a look at your life from that point of view again, you know?” Streisand said. “I look in the mirror and go, ‘How much time do I have left?’ … I’ve had several projects I’ve never fulfilled, but I have such fulfillment now with people that I love.”

FILE - Singer Barbra Streisand performs in New York, Oct. 11, 2012. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Reviving a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump wants a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a move that could save Americans tens of billions of dollars but drew immediate opposition from an industry that has been in his corner.

Trump was not clear in his social media post Friday night whether a cap might take effect through executive action or legislation, though one Republican senator said he had spoken with the president and would work on a bill with his “full support.” Trump said he hoped it would be in place Jan. 20, one year after he took office.

Strong opposition is certain from Wall Street in addition to the credit card companies, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign and have supported Trump's second-term agenda. Banks are making the argument that such a plan would most hurt poor people, at a time of economic concern, by curtailing or eliminating credit lines, driving them to high-cost alternatives like payday loans or pawnshops.

“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Researchers who studied Trump’s campaign pledge after it was first announced found that Americans would save roughly $100 billion in interest a year if credit card rates were capped at 10%. The same researchers found that while the credit card industry would take a major hit, it would still be profitable, although credit card rewards and other perks might be scaled back.

About 195 million people in the United States had credit cards in 2024 and were assessed $160 billion in interest charges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says. Americans are now carrying more credit card debt than ever, to the tune of about $1.23 trillion, according to figures from the New York Federal Reserve for the third quarter last year.

Further, Americans are paying, on average, between 19.65% and 21.5% in interest on credit cards according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. That has come down in the past year as the central bank lowered benchmark rates, but is near the highs since federal regulators started tracking credit card rates in the mid-1990s. That’s significantly higher than a decade ago, when the average credit card interest rate was roughly 12%.

The Republican administration has proved particularly friendly until now to the credit card industry.

Capital One got little resistance from the White House when it finalized its purchase and merger with Discover Financial in early 2025, a deal that created the nation’s largest credit card company. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is largely tasked with going after credit card companies for alleged wrongdoing, has been largely nonfunctional since Trump took office.

In a joint statement, the banking industry was opposed to Trump's proposal.

“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives," the American Bankers Association and allied groups said.

Bank lobbyists have long argued that lowering interest rates on their credit card products would require the banks to lend less to high-risk borrowers. When Congress enacted a cap on the fee that stores pay large banks when customers use a debit card, banks responded by removing all rewards and perks from those cards. Debit card rewards only recently have trickled back into consumers' hands. For example, United Airlines now has a debit card that gives miles with purchases.

The U.S. already places interest rate caps on some financial products and for some demographics. The Military Lending Act makes it illegal to charge active-duty service members more than 36% for any financial product. The national regulator for credit unions has capped interest rates on credit union credit cards at 18%.

Credit card companies earn three streams of revenue from their products: fees charged to merchants, fees charged to customers and the interest charged on balances. The argument from some researchers and left-leaning policymakers is that the banks earn enough revenue from merchants to keep them profitable if interest rates were capped.

"A 10% credit card interest cap would save Americans $100 billion a year without causing massive account closures, as banks claim. That’s because the few large banks that dominate the credit card market are making absolutely massive profits on customers at all income levels," said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote the research on the industry's impact of Trump's proposal last year.

There are some historic examples that interest rate caps do cut off the less creditworthy to financial products because banks are not able to price risk correctly. Arkansas has a strictly enforced interest rate cap of 17% and evidence points to the poor and less creditworthy being cut out of consumer credit markets in the state. Shearer's research showed that an interest rate cap of 10% would likely result in banks lending less to those with credit scores below 600.

The White House did not respond to questions about how the president seeks to cap the rate or whether he has spoken with credit card companies about the idea.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to reign in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long."

Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.

Hours before Trump's post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.

Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.

President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

FILE - Visa and Mastercard credit cards are shown in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)