Captain of the Starship

William Shatner has yielded a unique and much-parodied body of work during his musical career. Shatner typically speaks the lyrics as an exaggerated interpretive reading instead of merely singing them

Shatner's musical career began in 1968 with the release of his first album, The Transformed Man. Shatner used the album to compare contemporary pop songs of the period to the works of William Shakespeare by providing dramatic readings of Shakespeare interspersed with dramatic readings of the lyrics of songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Mr. Tambourine Man". However, this first release was widely mocked and parodied for its unusual style; at the end of "Mr. Tambourine Man", for example, Shatner suddenly shouts the song's title in a tortured voice. The album would later be panned on the Internet, with the "Captain James T. Kirk Singalong Page" serving clips as early as 1993.

Shatner has defended his "stylings", refusing to acknowledge it as an experiment that went wrong, and insisting instead that it was an acting performance from the perspective of an LSD user; the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds has often been abbreviated to LSD. This piece of music has been singled out by both Dave Barry and Mad magazine as being, in Mad's words, "truly unfortunate". George Clooney, for instance, chose this as one of the Desert Island Discs he would bring along if marooned – as an incentive to leave the island. He said, "If you listen to [this song], you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it to get off this island." In a 2003 Music Choice poll, it was voted as the worst Beatles cover of all time.

In 1977 a live double album titled William Shatner Live was released. Recorded on a live tour shortly before, it features Shatner performing excerpts from The War of the Worlds and Cyrano de Bergerac, among other things.

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