He Writes the Songs...
...Except when he doesn't. Barry Manilow talks about decades of hit music.
In certain circles it’s still cool to bash Barry Manilow. Those circles must feel awfully small as the years go by and everybody admits they like “Mandy” (which, by the way, Manilow didn’t write—thus quashing the urban legend that he wrote it about his dog). The man who topped the charts telling us he wrote the songs that made the whole world sing began headlining at the Las Vegas Hilton in 2005 and still sells millions of records more than 35 years after he entered the scene. He knows a pop hook, that’s for sure—he even wrote some famous songs for commercials (“I am stuck on a Band-Aid / And Band-Aid’s stuck on me”; “Like a good neighbor / State Farm is there…”). A professional relationship with Clive Davis, founder and president of Arista Records, continues to prove both Davis’s savvy and Manilow’s vocal adventurousness: The Greatest Songs of the Eighties finds the singer launching into hits like Journey’s “Open Arms”; it’s the latest in a collection of cover tunes that began in 2006 with a hugely successful tribute album to the 1950s.
Over the years, Manilow found time to salute Ol’ Blue Eyes (Manilow Sings Sinatra) and Broadway (Showstoppers), and, perhaps more importantly, lend his name to various fundraisers. He’s in Everett on Sunday, March 15, for Ultimate Manilow: The Hits…and then some, a benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
When Manilow agreed to a brief phone interview, I requested that people email me what they’d most like to ask him (well, I made that request after I bragged that I’d be speaking to Barry Manilow). Many of those questions are here and led to some surprising answers—unless you’ve always known Barry’s affinity for electronica…
You’ve done concerts for a lot of charitable causes. Why cystic fibrosis? This one kind of affected me because the daughter of the guy that runs the Hilton entertainment unit has cystic fibrosis and I’ve met her. Once you’ve put a face on people who have diseases of one sort or another you are never the same. Cystic fibrosis was two words that didn’t mean very much to me until I met Alexa and then it meant a lot. And then there’s this guy in your area named Harvey Platt—this is his passion. In all these benefits that I do there are usually one or two people who kill themselves to raise money and get famous people there. And Harvey is one of those for this. He’s really something else.
You’re going to be singing all of your famous hits—but what’s the “…and then some”? It depends on what they want. Amazingly enough, I’m actually able to fill between 90 minutes and two hours with songs that everybody recognizes.
Well, that doesn’t surprise me at all. It does me. It’s an amazing statement.
You’ve been releasing these albums featuring each decade of song. What’s your favorite decade for popular music? Well, the one I had the most fun with, believe it or not, was the ’50s because they were far away. As the decades got closer and closer they became too well known. By the time I got to the ’80s—“Careless Whisper,” how are you gonna top that? It’s a perfect record the way it is. All I can do is a karaoke version of it. But the ’50s are so far away that I could actually play around with them. So I had the most fun with them.
