Michael Kovac/Getty Images for STARZ(NEW YORK) — Captain Jean-Luc Picard: singing space cowboy?
Over the holiday weekend, actor Sir Patrick Stewart — best-known to most for playing the captain of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation — quietly released an online ad touting a two-record collection titled Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classics, Volumes 1 & 2.
The ad, filmed in deliberately cheesy style, features Stewart dressed in tacky cowboy fashion as he sings snippets of songs like “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and “Rawhide” both onstage with a band and superimposed against fake backdrops, while the announcer runs down the other songs the albums feature.
If it all sounds like a put-on, you’re partly right. The albums don’t exist but Stewart did, in fact, record five songs for a benefit EP, Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classic Sampler. The EP includes four country-themed tunes — “Buttons and Bows,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Ringo,” and “I’m an Old Cowhand” — and one Christmas song, “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
You can order Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classic Sampler online now, with proceeds going to benefit The International Rescue Committee. According to its website, The IRC “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and gain control of their future.”
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