A Conversation with Barry Manilow – HuffPost 10.22.14
Mike Ragogna: First off, thanks for the interview and it’s a true blue spectacle that I landed it, Barry!
Barry Manilow: [laughs] Sure, sure.
MR: The concept for the album is pretty unique. I don’t think anyone’s done a whole album of posthumous duet tributes.
BM: Well, Verve, the record company that I’m on this month are great people and one of the guys I’m working with is a wonderful guy named Jay Landers who’s a Senior Vice President there said, “What about you doing a duets album?” Of course, everybody’s doing duet albums and some of them are pretty good, too, so I said, “Yeah, let me think about it.” I said, “How am I going to make my duets album any different from all of these other duets albums that we’re hearing constantly?” So I made a list of who I would like to sing with and as I started making my list I realized many of these people are gone. I would love to have sung with Judy and with John Denver who was a friend of mine and with Louis Armstrong and Sammy Davis Jr.. It would be my dream to have been in the music business when they were at their peaks. I said that to Jay and I said, “I know this is impossible,” but he said, “It’s not impossible.”
Music technology has gone pretty far and there’s this company that David Foster worked with who can actually remove the orchestra from these old records and just give me the vocals by themselves, which sounded amazing. It took them a long time to do eleven songs. They gave me eleven vocals by themselves. I’m pretty good at my music technology and I sat for two months creating eleven duets out of songs that never were duets. I rearranged the songs, I re-orchestrated the accompaniment and I made them into duets. I changed keys where I wanted to, I made bigger endings than they originally had, you can see that it’s a different angle for every song. I’ve tried to stick pretty close to their original arrangements but I was able to play around with them and make them into duets. This album was a miracle. It took a lot of people to put this together with me. Now that it’s all done, I’m very proud of it.
MR: On “I Believe In You And Me” with Whitney Houston, it’s clear you love the original vocal, and you’re not dominating the track. Actually, that’s true for all of these duets. You have a lot of respect for them.
BM: I do. It was one of my goals to try and show the audience why these people were such legends. I didn’t want to get in their way. Singing the duet with Whitney was the most challenging because her style is so far away from what I do. Her church vocal approach is so far away from my pop singing it took me days to figure out where I should sing, how I should do it, when do I harmonize with her, when do I leave her alone. I had to do this with all of them, but Whitney was the most challenging.
MR: You said they pulled the vocals out of the records, but did you pull at least some lead vocals from original 16- or 24-track tapes?
BM: I’d have to go back to David, my co-producer, but I would say maybe one or two were actually doing multi-track recording. The rest of them came out of the old scratchy records. I’m telling you, this is a miracle how these men made this record sound like I’m singing with them yesterday. They all sound beautiful. Their vocals sound like I was in the same room with them. Mike, I’m telling you, I ran for the tissues a lot on this project.
MR: How did you get through a recording process this intense?
BM: I’m telling you, it was a very emotional experience. I would put my headset on, they’d sing to me and I would get lost in it and then realize they’re not there! This is when they were young and beautiful and in their prime, all of them. Andy Williams and Judy, this was at their peak. And then to think that they really weren’t standing next to me when they may as well have been!
MR: Another interesting thing about this project is that there are songs on here that seemed like they were yours to cover already. For instance, “Sunshine On My Shoulders” seems like a perfect song for you. And there’s the Andy Williams track…
BM: When I sang with Andy Williams, I was surprised to hear that I sounded so close to his voice. Now and again I would forget, “Which one is me and which one is him?”
MR: Are you happy that as you’re maturing, you’re taking on the soul and the depth of a lot of these classic artists who also matured into the artists they became?
BM: Please, it was an honor to do this. It’s an honor to even hear you say that, but it was an honor to do this. Listening back to this whole album is just an amazing project for me.
MR: Does this make you want to do something like this again in the future?
BM: As I finished it up, I was talking with friends and I heard, “Why didn’t you do one with George Harrison? Why didn’t you do one with Marvin Gaye?” Why didn’t I? I didn’t think about it. I went through the big list but there are more. If this thing becomes popular, it would be great to do another one.
MR: As a producer, arranger and talent-discoverer it seems like you have to be in constant motion. Are you that guy?
BM: Listen, I keep coming up with ideas. The well hasn’t run dry yet. I’m waiting to get bored, but an album like this for a performer it starts my motor going at a hundred miles an hour. If I can keep coming up with ideas like this I’ll keep going. I’ve always got the next one. There’s always “the next project” with me. Like I say, the well hasn’t run dry yet. I’m ninety-five years old and I’m still promoting albums for God’s sake.
MR: [laughs] No, no, not quite ninety-five. Hey, you were a wonderful mentor onAmerican Idol. That experience must have been very fulfilling for you.
BM: It was surprising. These young people just don’t know about the songs that I grew up with. They don’t know anything from Irving Berlin or George Gershwin or Jule Styne or Stephen Sondheim, they don’t know any of it and they don’t get the opportunity to sing great lyric, they don’t get the opportunity to sing a great melody anymore. In my catalog, there are good lyrics and there are good melodies, so when they sang “I Made It Through The Rain” and they started to do their doodling and their vocal acrobatics I would say, “Wait a minute. Why are you singing this song? Who are you singing it to? What does this word mean?” I would have to go through it line by line and I do think they did really well on that week.
MR: I’m sure you helped a lot of them because they’ll think of that advice in the future. I’m often baffled by why a syllable needs that many notes.
BM: I think you’re right. Whitney was one of the inventors of that kind of singing, but when I was listening to her do that song she sang the melody and the lyric in the beginning of the song. She didn’t start doing those vocal acrobatics in the beginning. She sang the song the way the composer wrote it and told us what the story of the song was. Then as the song built, she dropped in the church. By the time she got to the last verse and chorus, she had earned the right to do whatever she wanted to do with this melody, but she had already told us what the song was about and then she started to drop in this fantastic way of singing. I’m telling you, she was the inventor of that kind of singing. But these days these singers start there and after a while how many notes can you sing in one bar? There’s no emotion anymore, it’s just, “Listen to how many notes I can do!”
MR: And yeah, when Whitney dropped the gospel into it, you heard the soul behind the notes, not just a lot of notes.
BM: Yes, you’re absolutely right! It wasn’t just singing notes for Whitney. Like I say, she had earned it. She was telling the story the way she wanted to, but not right at the beginning.
MR: Beautiful. Since we’re kind of on the subject, what advice do you have for new artists?
BM: It all depends on who the artist is. My overall advice for young musicians and young artists would be to learn how to read music. I know it sounds dumb, but I’m telling you, man… Young musicians and young singers, learn how to read music. If you can read music, you’ll always be able to work. If you can’t, maybe you will become Whitney Houston, but that’s a rarity. If you can read music, you can always work because you can do studio jobs, you can do commercials, you can do whatever you want and actually have a career and if you are really talented then great. But if you don’t happen to luck into something like a hit single, then you can always work.
MR: That’s really good advice. By the way, earlier, I wanted to add that your “What A Wonderful World”/”What A Wonderful Life” duet with Louis Armstrong was pretty clever.
BM: Yeah, it was kind of a challenge to write a brand new song that fit over “What A Wonderful World,” but I think it came out okay.
MR: Were there any moments on the album where you discovered something about your duetist that you’d never known before?
BM: All of them. These people are not legends because of luck. Every single one of them had this little extra something that made them stars. The sound of Judy Garland’s voice, there’s something in her vocal chords that is just so appealing. She’s one of the greatest acting singers of all time. The same thing with all of them. There’s something special about all of them. I always knew it but having my headset on and them singing to me in the headset, it was really a very moving experience.
MR: And of course, with you being a writer, “The Song’s Gotta Come From The Heart.”
BM: [laughs] It does. Don’t ask me where I found that one, but it was a ball to do that one.
MR: I know this isn’t exactly what an artist with as extensive a career as you have wants to hear, but your first hit, “Mandy,” was the first recording I ever heard by you and it played on New York’s WNEW-FM. Loved it, and it still pops into my head from time to time.
BM: Thank you, Michael. It’s the big one for me, too. It’s the most moving one for me, too. Now it has become more than a song for me, it has become the memories of this young kid, I didn’t know what I was doing really. I wasn’t supposed to be a singer, I was supposed to be a musician. What was I doing behind the microphone and singing? When I think back on it, it’s just an amazing moment for me.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne