Cory Monteith.

Hearing of a 31 year old whose life has ended, possibly in part due to their inability to overcome their demons and addictions, is pretty heartbreaking. I wasn’t a big watcher of Glee, probably only because I’m not a big watcher of a lot of TV these days, but I liked that there was a show that was so unabashed in its celebration of pop music.

Cory Monteith played Finn Hudson on the hit show and his death a couple of days ago in a Vancouver hotel room leaves a massive hole in Glee – both in terms of story-lines and more importantly – in terms of devastated cast-mates.

Featured below are two songs from Glee. The second one highlights Monteith from Glee’s first ever episode in which they famously helped revive Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ – making it the old but new Living On A Prayer for probably every second Western-world party for the next few years.

The first song, however, doesn’t have the singing of Monteith, but it does give you an example of the validity of Glee even if like me, it’s not a show you regularly watched. Featuring the singers on Glee known as “The Warblers,” this is their version of the Barbra Streisand / Barry Gibb song from 1980 What Kind Of Fool.

One of countless top 10 hit songs the Gibb brothers wrote, this is melancholy pop of the highest order. A duet which details the regrets of a failed relationship where a third party has provided a brief and unsatisfying temptation, What Kind Of Fool is desperately sad. While nothing will beat the Streisand / Gibb original (from the 1980 album Guilty), I really like the Glee version. More-so, I love that a show as mainstream as this isn’t shy of tackling what amounts to an underground hit, albeit one that soared into the US top 10 more than 30 years ago.