In her premiere appearance at the Grammy Museum for its program “The Drop”, which highlights newly recorded releases on the distribution date, Melissa Manchester talked about her campaign to make an independent record, over 40 years in music and her artistic philosophy. Then, she took the stage and performed several songs. This was an intense, insightful interview (read my own interview with the singer-songwriter here) with the Grammy Foundation’s Scott Goldman. The sold-out audience at LA Live’s Grammy Museum, filled with musicians, record industry veterans, museum donors and those her daughter Hannah dubbed “fanchesters”, were held by every moment. Afterwards, the Grammy winner signed copies of her new album, You Gotta Love the Life, which she kicked off on Jan. 31 with two sold out shows at Spaghettini and the Dave Koz Lounge.
The event ushers in a whirlwind phase for Manchester, who turns 64 tomorrow and performs her new single, the intoxicating “Feelin’ for You”, with its blistering guitar solo by Keb’ Mo’, on Monday’s episode of Home & Family on the Hallmark Channel. Then, she’s touring again in Florida and the Midwest before appearing on Tavis Smiley’s show on PBS to promote the album, which appeared this week on Amazon’s top ten for jazz albums. The Bronx native, whose new album includes songwriting collaborations with Paul Reiser (Whiplash), the late Hal David and a tune with one of the co-writers of her Grammy-winning hit “You Should Hear How She Talks About You”, returns to New York City for a three-night engagement at 54 Below.
The campaign to support the release of her 20th album began in earnest, however, in the Clive Davis Theatre at the Grammy Museum, where she regaled the audience with tales of the album’s guest artist Stevie Wonder joining students for an impromptu version of “Superstition” at Citrus College where she recorded You Gotta Love the Life. There were also tales of working with Hal David, who studied journalism, on how that affected his writing what turns out to be his last lyric and of her singing partner on that tune, Dionne Warwick, and seeing her idol perform for the first time at the Copacabana. There were other famous singer, musician and star stories, too, including a story about working with Ella Fitzgerald, whom Melissa Manchester says made her more fully conscious of musical performance.
What makes her thoughts and answers fascinating is how she integrates each lesson into an intelligent examination of her own work and unfolds her storyteller approach to writing and performing songs, which she says she began to learn after auditioning for a class in songwriting with Paul Simon at New York University when she was 17 when his “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—one of pop’s bestselling singles—was at the top of the charts. Melissa Manchester was one of eight students chosen for Simon’s class, which launched a career of what she calls “deconstructing a song” in order to create each song as an expression. From Simon, whom she says forecast the change from melody-based to rhythm-based songwriting, she said she learned that while the stories may have all been told, the magic lies in the telling.
For example, she explained that she envisioned her rendition of “Walk on By” as a story of a homeless woman dropping off her two kids for the last time, an idea which spun into the audience and made everyone really think about the classic tune.
Thinking is crucial to Melissa Manchester’s approach, she said on Tuesday night. In fact, she told the audience that she teaches her music students at University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music to “not be lazy about your thinking” and “to think as deeply as possible”. Observing that Barbra Streisand slowed down “Happy Days are Here Again”, she noted that it changed the way people perceived how popular music could be performed. She said that her own input for song selection while under contract at Arista Records, where she had some of her earliest success with mogul Clive Davis, such as the 1979 hit “Don’t Cry Out Loud”, was limited. Remembering her earlier days at Bell Records, she contrasted her relationship with Davis by noting that Bell’s president “did this really revolutionary thing…he left me alone.”
Almost as an exercise in self-redemption, You Gotta Love the Life bears the mark of her career theme of personal, first-handed empowerment and, ultimately, liberation. It’s as if the album is an answer to Clive Davis—and even Paul Simon—who told her to stop listening to her muse, Laura Nyro, whom Manchester described as being like a “shaft of light as a beautiful explosion” of music.
However, reminiscing wasn’t merely waxing nostalgic during Melissa Manchester’s album “drop” at the Grammy Museum. Each remembrance served the purpose of what one can learn from the creative process. She spoke of lessons from Sly and the Family Stone singing the anthemic line “thank you for letting me be myself,” singing with Barry Manilow, Patti Austin and Ashford and Simpson on backup vocals and wandering into the Children’s Television Workshop in Manhattan which was part of Sesame Street. She mentioned working as an uherette and as a parking attendant and talked about discovering from a country music artist the value of meeting an audience following a performance. And she recalled being a founding member of Bette Midler’s backup group the Harlettes and performing at gay bathhouses. She may have been ‘Toots in the middle’ but that didn’t stop her from seeing that Midler basked in the “radiance of her authenticity” while giving gays a sense of belonging before the Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village.
Asked about her earliest memories of music, Melissa Manchester, who said she went to opera rehearsals with her bassoonist father, answered that her first musical memory is of her father playing “Greensleeves” and her twirling around and around, as though in her own world, which she later identified as what she calls “the sonic thermal”. How the Oscar nominee—the only artist to be nominated twice in the Best Song category in the same year—came to think, really think, about writing and singing a song—she doesn’t like “to see the rhyme coming”—is what she delivered with enthusiasm on Tuesday night.
When asked, Melissa Manchester said that she wants her first independent album to reflect the joy of her life here and now. This came through during the conversation. As if to provide proof of concept without showing off, she then performed several songs, bringing the audience to their feet in unified applause, demonstrating not only that this pioneering artist loves the life; that part of the life which constitutes an audience—her peers, her fans, her fellow singers, musicians and artists—love her, too.
(Click here to buy You Gotta Love the Life as CD or digital download).
Melissa Manchester’s 20th album, You Gotta Love the Life, cashes in on 40 years in popular music (click here to pre-order or buy as CD or download). The San Fernando Valley resident, mother and singer/songwriter has produced her first new album in 10 years with a top-caliber team of producers, writers and musicians, including Dionne Warwick, Dave Koz, Al Jarreau, the late Hal David and Whiplash‘s Paul Reiser, among others, and she’s working on a new stage musical, too.
After studying songwriting with Paul Simon, performing with Bette Midler and breaking out on Bell Records before working with Arista mogul Clive Davis (Whitney Houston), the Bronx native scored hits and acclaim throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Manchester, a musician’s and businesswoman’s daughter, emerged within the cultural context of the singer-songwriter trend with Home to Myself (1973) and other albums including Don’t Cry Out Loud (1978) and For the Working Girl (1980) before being nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Song in the same year and winning the Grammy for her hit “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” in 1982. Melissa Manchester went on to record Mathematics in 1985, Christmas and tribute albums and a song for Sydney Pollack’s epic Out of Africa, which won the Oscar for Best Picture.
You Gotta Love the Life came to my attention a couple of years after we met during a screening of The Weinstein Company picture Dirty Girl (read my 2012 interview about the gay-themed movie co-starring Mary Steenburgen and featuring Melissa here). I had heard about the work in progress and I attended recording sessions in 2014. What I heard enticed me to cover her newest career achievement, which officially premieres after an album release party at a new Beverly Hills jazz club next week.
This is a partial and edited transcript of our September 11, 2014 interview in Burbank, California.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Now that the album is finished, which is your favorite song?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Oh, I don’t have a favorite because each song was such a process—to find the new world of these songs—and they didn’t come to life until we were in the studio. They lived in my head. I’ve never heard them fleshed out, so there’s no favorite song.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is there one that you find yourself listening to over and over?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Well, “You Gotta Love the Life”, which was written last in the tradition of theater—in theater, the opening [song] is written last because you have to find out what the whole show’s about—and, although I always knew that was going to be the title, the actual song wasn’t completed until we got it to the studio. The parts had no ending and the musicians and [co-producer] Terry Wollman and I all looked at each other and said: ‘how does it end?’ And we said, ‘well, we don’t know yet.’ So everybody just stood around while we charted the ending of the piece and of course to have Lee Thornburg’s horns—with his Tower of Power fame—really captured the jaggedness of the life of all the music I ever grew up with that I loved [including] the angularity of growing up in New York, the quirkiness of this version of normal. I’m big on versions of normal because, as I get older, I realize that the way I grew up was so unusual. The value of it for my sister and me is incredible. So, at this point, now that I’m deep into my life and this deep into my career, time becomes fluid and I look at what I’ve learned along the way and in that song particularly for me.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What’s the impetus for the first single, “Feelin’ for You”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: It was written while I was doing research in the Mississippi delta years ago. I was with some people in a juke joint—a shack where you go to listen to music and drink—and there was this guy who was clearly, really drunk. He made his way to me while people were dancing and getting loaded and he said to me, in this gravelly voice, ‘are you married?’ And I said ‘yes, very.’ And he said, ‘oh, that’s too bad, ‘cause I got a feelin’ for you.’ I thought to myself: I could write that song. Then, I got a chance to sit down with young Sara Niemietz and said we should write this song and it sort of fell out—it was fantastic producing with Keb’ Mo’ because he really understood the blues. He helped to pull out its authentic core so the song really sounds as if it comes from a real place.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: You talk about the blues. What genres should one can expect from this record?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Love songs, ballads, reinterpretations of classic songs. I sing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Something Wonderful” from The King and I as a prayer—as an a capella prayer—because that’s how the song lifted itself to me. There are songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin in a deeply Brazilian approach. I do “Be My Baby” as a deeply dreamy love song. These things were all worked out on stage. The stage is the lab, the workplace, where I invite the audience to come along on the journey. And they’re happy, too, because I let them know that, if they don’t like it, they have to let me know that, too. We were performing these songs for so long that it got to the point where one of my fans finally said ‘here’s a check—go and record this already, please’. The truth of my journey is that people are more interested in more music than in more merchandise. Now that the industry is so deeply changed at its core, that veil between me and the audience has been lifted and what’s been revealed is that the audience is so interested in the process—almost as much as I am—and yet, when I come onstage, they’re excited that I showed up and that I’m sharing new things. It’s as if people have such a sense of territorial investment in it that, even though they know how the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, they still get excited when the bunny shows up. This is unheard of because the whole thing about the industry and all of show business was all about the illusion. Now, I lift the veil on the illusion, they bring it down again and go ‘what a lovely surprise’ and it’s a wild, lovely aspect of time and experience—
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Today’s audiences are more savvy—
MELISSA MANCHESTER: They are.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: And they’re able to hold both the context of illusion and going back into the story—?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Absolutely and it doesn’t just apply to 20-year-olds who have grown up with new technology. It’s anybody who comes to listen. Whatever ride I want to take them on, they’re open to the journey. It’s unbelievable.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What emotional impact does this have—does the audience investment energize you as an artist?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: It certainly makes me feel more empowered, because the old paradigm was that I signed a contract with a big record company, which was essentially a bank, and the engine to get the product out, and, at the end of the day, even when I made back all of the money that they fronted me they still owned the master [recording], which is awful but it’s the conventional way of doing business. Now, we’re trying it a new way. This is really the first album where I’m responsible for all of the choices. It reflects my desire to complete the circle of how I started making albums, which was being with a bunch of guys in a room working on new songs. I’ve made an album where I was tracking stuff—and it’s more fun having people around.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is it?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Oh my gosh—yes.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Were there times when you felt that there was too much collaboration?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: No. I felt so honored that these studio stars kept saying yes—I had a dollar to pay them—and they kept saying tell us when you want us to come back. Everybody was having a lovely time. Because we were recording this [album] at Citrus College [in southern California], where the studio is a classroom, and our engineer is a professor, not only did we have professional musicians of note, the students kept coming and watching. They had never seen live records being made. Then, when guest artists started showing up and the kids came, it was [like] this wonderful, breathing organism—plus, I would keep posting on social media to update audiences, so everybody knew what was going on. It was so touching at the end of the [crowdfunding] campaign. We said ‘thank you, we’ve crossed the finish line and we’ve got enough [money to complete the independently produced album]’ and people kept saying ‘please don’t stop posting’. I started to feel that just as I was finding my writing voice, so it was an unexpected gift.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: You teach a class at USC. Does the accessibility help you navigate the new normal of funding and making an album?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Well, I’ve worked with some form of a band for a long time. [My manager, Susan Holder] and I have been working together for 31 years. Most of the band keeps saying yes and coming back. So, in terms of working with musicians, I’m used to it. Also, I brought Terry Wollman in to co-produce and other musicians who are very patient, because a lot of the songs are brand new. I’m not an educated musician—I am self-educated, and I convey ideas by singing them—so the musicians or Terry or Sue would hear things and say this is what she’s saying. It was beautiful. In terms of working my way into this new industrial age of social media and crowdsourcing, it came straight from my [University of Southern California Thornton School of Music] students. They would walk in with their new EP every six months with beautiful photographs, shrink wrap and credits and live songs and I asked them how they did it, thinking they would tell me about some independent record company. But they would say crowdfunding and they would say, ‘you should do that’. And one of my students, Barry Harris, walked us through different options and told us about choices, so we made the decision to go with Indiegogo. Barry really educated us educators. It’s beautiful.
MELISSA MANCHESTER: We gave advance copies in Las Vegas—everyone in the audience got an advance copy—and feedback is wonderful and it’s so dear. Some favorites are “Feelin’ for You”, “You Gotta Love the Life” and “Claudia”, which is about my sister, and “No There There”. But it’s positive across the board and no one’s really picking out one favorite. They’re saying they like the whole thing. Someone said they always feel that they sit down with me and I ask what’s going on in their life and then I go off and write these songs. That’s very touching because the songs are mostly a reflection of what’s going on in my life. What I do know for sure, which is true in theater and true in songwriting, is that the more specific I am, the more universal the response. It just works out.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Has anyone said anything you don’t want to hear?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: No. I haven’t had negative feedback yet. But we’ve just crossed the finish line. Because it is crowdsourced, it’s exhausting, so I’m aware of every nickel and every moment and it’s all on me. But I’m also not hearing from someone 3,000 miles away telling me to do this as a disco record. It’s grounded in the music and what I’ve been going through and seeing around me. One of the songs I wrote is called “You Are My Heart”, which I wrote on June 26, 2013, when the Supreme Court [in the Windsor v. United States case] struck down [President Clinton’s 1996 law] DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting gays from marriage]. My dearest friend had been with his partner for six years but he wasn’t free to marry. So, on that date, I texted him and asked ‘do I hear wedding bells?’ We started a conversation by text and I said I was thrilled that his life was about to change and he signed his text ‘you are my heart’, so I said [to myself] ‘I can write that song’. That’s how it shows up for me. Life just shows up in songs. So, I wrote “You Are My Heart” and sang it at his wedding. At some point, maybe it will just be a wedding song—not attached to anything in particular. It was inspiring—a moment [can be] inspiring.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What was the hardest song to write?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Well, the hardest song to finish was “You Gotta Love the Life” because I really wanted that to reflect my walk. You know, there’s a very short list of songs about show business. Over the years, there’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with the lyric “Let’s go on with the show”, “Let Me Entertain You”, “Putting it Together” and “On Broadway” and I very mindfully thought of what my angle was. “On Broadway” is about trying to get in, “There’s No Business Like Show Business” is about whatever and I really wanted to reflect what I knew to be true. The waking up and not knowing where you are, the rigors of being in relationships knowing you’re going to be leaving, the emotional cost, the financial cost, the risk of it all the time, the odds being against you all the time, the fact that you’re always auditioning—the audition is never, ever over—never—and, yet, there’s just something, the hunger that’s really live and palpable and you go nuts if you don’t do it, you go nuts if you don’t write songs. “You Gotta Love the Life” was hard to finish because I had to find the language. I had to find the singable language that was authentic to the story I was trying to tell. Sue would say, ‘we’re going into the studio and we need this song’. Sharon Vaughan and I started writing it but I wanted a complete song which means bridges—I like bridges, I’m very big on bridges because it wraps it up—and I knew that the bridge had to give this vast overview, this list of what it feels like and sounds like with a nod to the humanity of it. So, I stood in my shower, which loosens stuff in the far right rear of my brain, and I started to feel the words of the bridge come out. As soon as I started to feel the first part come out—“Late nights/missed flights/wondering what city I’m in”—once I could feel that language show up, I had something to hang on to. The character was expressing herself. So, I thought, keep digging. Keep digging.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What was the easiest song to write?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: “Feelin’ for You” rolled off. That’s part of the value in having a collaborator, you do use them—not diminishing what people contribute to songs—but I do know that when I’m sitting across from somebody who’s talented, it keeps me loose.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Do you try to work with people who are equals or those whom you think are better?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: I only try to work with equals and people that are better than me—I only want to be surrounded by people that are smarter than me. Otherwise, I move to hurt people, they just bore me. “Feelin’ for You” was written by a very young artist who has a fantastic voice, Sara Niemietz. She is very talented. She had worked on 22 Jump Street and she’s performing all over. There’s something very unusual about her voice and the tone of it. So, when I would hear her just sing when we were writing this [song], it kept the next image going because I didn’t actually write about that drunk guy coming towards me—what I used was the attitude of the language. That’s how I pull suggestions to inform how I write.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What new ground do you break?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: The sound, the concept, the songs, the choices—it’s all a reflection of me now. It’s very personal but very specific—nobody said ‘do this song.’ Nobody said ‘don’t do that song’. It’s more authentic. This is all me. If you like it, we can have lunch. If you don’t, well, have a nice life. There was no insinuation of how I should really be doing this for my own betterment. There was no interpretation of me. It’s just the fleshed out ideas to their beautiful and natural ending. It’s about musicians bringing it, the result of beautiful guest artists opening up the songs. It’s not a duo album but my connection to these artists is real. These are the artists I wanted to work with.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Please give me a one word that captures the essence of each song on your new album. “Big Light”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: One word is really hard. “Big Light” is inspiration. Yeah.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Feelin’ for You”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Drunkeness [laughs]
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “You Gotta Love the Life”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Truth.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Be My Baby”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Unfolding—because somebody else wrote the song and somebody else brought it into the world in a very different way. But, when I separated the way it was brought into the world and my response to it, it resonated to me. The song—the deeper life of the song—unfolded into an entirely different song. So, it serves an entirely different purpose.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: It’s more somber—?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: It is. It’s dreamier. I’m big on weariness. Weariness is in a lot of my songs—it always has been. It’s in “Midnight Blue”. It’s in “Come in from the Rain”. It’s just true. I don’t know why, but, oh, well… I feel that in the way I interpret “Be My Baby”. It’s hopeful weariness. It’s the state of humanity where, if you live long enough, even when you’re hopeful, life is wearying—but it’s simply the best idea around, so we forge on. That’s what this interpretation of “Be My Baby” is about.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is “Other End of the Phone” a love song?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Well—it is, I think, but because it is sung between Dionne Warwick and me, it’s another kind of love song. It’s the ultimate, deep friendship song. It’s that kind of love, I think. It could have been a romantic kind of song, but once Dionne said ‘yes’, and I let [Hal David’s] lyrics be between two women, it was what you hope for your 3 a.m. friends—that, when you need them, they’re there. It’s Hal David’s last lyric and it’s Dionne Warwick completing that circle because her career was built on his lyrics with Burt Bacharach’s music.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “You Are My Heart”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Love.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Let’s Face the Music and Dance/From This Moment On”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Everything old is better again. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” is, in one word, fabulous—it’s fabulous. “From This Moment On” is, for me, triumphant.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Claudia”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Sister. My beautiful sister.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Your Love is Where I Live”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: One word? Melancholy.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “No There There”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Delusional.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Open My Heart to Your Love”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Hopeful.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “The Other One”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Learning. It’s about what I learned about placing someone above me—placing my hopes and my value in someone above my own and the consequence of that. It’s [about] what I learned over time when I didn’t put myself at the top of a to-do list, where everybody else is at the top. It’s about the consequences of not putting myself at the top.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is there a song on the album that captures when you do put yourself first?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: “I Know Who I Am”.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “I Know Who I Am”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Beginning.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: “Something Wonderful”?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Prayer.
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SCOTT HOLLERAN: Have you read Clive Davis’ book?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: I have not. I have been told by people that I am the thorn in his side or something.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: He writes about what you were saying about recording contracts earlier in the interview—that he thought you should have done this or that. How would you describe, for someone who doesn’t know, your relationship with Clive Davis at Arista?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: It was extremely confusing because when he inherited me from Bell Records—he inherited me and Barry Manilow and Tony Orlando and Dawn—
SCOTT HOLLERAN: —But Clive Davis wanted you; he sought you out?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Yes, he did. He absorbed the three of us and that was great. I was the only one of those three who was an album artist. I was officially designated as an album artist. So, I thought life was going to sort of continue on—I had auditioned for Clive years earlier and was not accepted—so when I made the Midnight Blue album, it was lovely. I was left alone. Everything was supportive. We were in the studio—it was lovely. Then, Midnight Blue came out. Radio was still changing, so we were still doing very long promotional tours in primary and secondary markets in 1974 and I was told that Midnight Blue was unusual and that it was touching people and, as they say, the only thing harder than the first single is the second single. So, when we went to make Better Days and Happy Endings, I was just continuing my process. The industry started to change. Electronics started to insinuate into music production. Producers started to become the centerpiece of what was going on. I didn’t quite get it, because the consequence of that is that the artist was given songs that would serve the sound as opposed to the artist. I thought well, why am I being invited to this party since anybody really could [do this]. Now, I was also very naïve. I have a letter from Clive that he sent me several years ago and his perception was that I was trying to be the next Joni Mitchell. My feeling was that her position had already been taken so I wasn’t really trying to become the next anything. I was just trying to become as good a version of myself as I could. I simply have a sense of what works for my voice so this electronic world was very non-acoustic and very non-vocal centric, but suddenly the vocal had to fit into this electro-centric world which was extremely uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t raised that way. I didn’t write on those instruments. I didn’t perform with those instruments. It was not in my world. It was grating.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Isn’t this an argument for the much-maligned motion picture studio system, where the artist is cultivated as an artist?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Yes—if you believe the artist really has talent, because what happens as a consequence of all of that packaging is that people who are not really talented become stars.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Right, that’s the downside. But Hollywood also produced real, talented stars under its studio system, such as Mickey Rooney, Sammy Davis, Jr., Doris Day, Judy Garland and, whatever its flaws, there were artists who were trained to tap dance, sing and act to capitalize on their skills, but you and other recording artists were never really cultivated by the record companies in that way—
MELISSA MANCHESTER: No, we weren’t. None of us were. Clive had the final say and, because he was so—you know, I saw him on an interview when his book came out and he said it was really all about business to him. It was never all about business to me. I just didn’t get that part [about business] until later. So, I could not engage in any of those discussions without being extremely emotional. We had great success and astounding failure.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: In seeking to be all about business, Clive Davis did discover some amazing artists, such as Whitney Houston—
MELISSA MANCHESTER: He did. He made mistakes as well. I had brought him “Whenever I Call You Friend” [a song MM co-wrote with Kenny Loggins, which became a hit for Stevie Nicks] and he said, ‘ah, it’s so-so.’ I said ‘really? You don’t want to record this song?’
SCOTT HOLLERAN: So, even working on the profit motive, he made mistakes?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: That’s exactly right. He remembers history his way and I remember history my way. He remembers bringing me “Don’t Cry Out Loud”. I remember being friends with Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager and hearing “Don’t Cry Out Loud” as a very quiet song, bringing it to him and saying yes, it’s gorgeous, let’s do it the way Peter did it—as beautiful and quiet. When I showed up in the studio and the cannons blew on this huge version—which turned out beautifully, it turned out as a gift.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is there anything you would do differently?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: If I had a deeper sense of myself, I think I would have tried to summon the kind of courage that Bruce Springsteen summoned when he sat out the last two years of his contract at Columbia Records. My brain went: ‘oh, let’s just get through it.’ So, I just kept making records. Still and all, it has taken as long as it has taken me to create this album. Indiegogo didn’t exist in the 1970s. It does now. I absolutely believe in divine timing.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Is this album the culmination of lessons you’ve learned—?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: —Absolutely. This album is about everything I’ve learned for once and for all, about being soft with myself about what I don’t understand and reaching out to people who know more than me who can help me get my art out. I am sorry I didn’t stay in touch with Paul Simon after he taught me in a songwriting class when I was 17. It would be fun to send this to him and say, what do you think after 40 years.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Looking back at who’s really in your corner and who’s not—?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Susan Holder [is in my corner].
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Today is September 11. You’re a New Yorker. Do you have any thoughts on what happened on this date in New York in 2001?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: The bad guys thought they could get away with it and our government did not pay attention to red flags and put them at the top of the list. It’s sickening what’s happening in the world right now, yet our president made a statement last night that says ‘that’s enough’. I was raised in New York when the phrase Never Forget was very real. That was after World War 2 and I remember the guy who sold me candy [when I was a child] who had tattoos on his arm from the [Nazi concentration] camps and he rolled up his sleeves in the summer, so that’s what I knew. The whole concept to me was, as [Winston] Churchill said, Never, never, never, never, never give up. For me, [September 11] means Never, never, never, never, never forget.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: What do you think of Beyonce?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: She’s formidable. Her message to young girls and men is very clear and coming from fantastic inner strength and clarity.
MELISSA MANCHESTER: I don’t know anything about him but he’s really talented.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Who have you recently connected with as an artist that you listen to?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: I listen to new music all the time. I listen to the college station. When I’m very stressed, I go back to listening to classical music. It slows me down and slows my brain down and forces me to follow its journey instead—it doesn’t reinforce chaos. What does break my heart, however, is that, while I was walking in the park the other day and these two young women were playing something out of their radio and I don’t know who the artist was but every line started with the N word. I thought to myself: you are breaking the heart of the universe. There is no argument—and I’ve heard them all—for why this is polluting the air. That said, Adele is fantastic. Alanis Morissette is great. I’m listening to my colleague Billy Child’s rendition of Laura Nyro, who was my muse when I was 17. I’ve been trying to reinterpret one of her songs but I can’t figure my way into one of her songs. I love Joan Armatrading. I love Michael Buble because he really understands the classics and yet he’s a really good writer. He really on some level connects appropriately. Some do those classics as a pile of notes. I like Usher. He’s certainly fantastic to watch—he’s a great dancer.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Which classic artist is underappreciated?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: That’s tough to say because most were appreciated in their time. [Pauses] I think Laura Nyro is underappreciated. She was appreciated for a brief time for her connection to The Fifth Dimension—they recorded two of her early songs, “Bill” and “Stoned Soul Picnic”—and, with Joni Mitchell—they were the most exquisite poet songwriters of their day. They almost changed the shape of what a song could be. They created landmark songs.
SCOTT HOLLERAN: Why didn’t Laura Nyro break through?
MELISSA MANCHESTER: She left. She’d had enough.
(click here to pre-order or buy Melissa Manchester’s You Gotta Love the Life as CD or download)
Melissa Manchester’s self-made You Gotta Love the Life, set for release on February 10 (click here to pre-order as CD or download), combines a sense of triumph with grit. The recording artist’s first independent album, which, for purposes of full disclosure, I experienced during recording sessions and in post-production while storytelling for the artist’s social media, revels in that which one earns.
Melissa Manchester does it all on this record: gospel, blues, samba, ballads and pop, everything under the influence of jazz, in a variety of retrospective and introspective classic and original songs. But, after listening to You Gotta Love the Life on CD while driving and on mobile devices many times, I’ve found what I think is its theme. Throughout the winding, even wandering, journey, the mysterious and enduring singer and songwriter proclaims—and reclaims—ownership of her work and life.
Melissa Manchester, whom I recently interviewed about her career, including You Gotta Love the Life (read my exclusive interview about the new album here and my 2012 interview here), writes and sings like an emancipated woman. The Bronx native studied songwriting in New York with Paul Simon as an ingenue, backed up Bette Midler and emerged in the 1970s with such hits as “Come in from the Rain”, “Midnight Blue” and her transformative, anthemic rendition of Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager’s nuanced “Don’t Cry Out Loud”. Here, she produces with Terry Wollman a seasoned and authentic record.
Click to pre-order or buy
The 14-song collection begins with the propulsive title track, “You Gotta Love the Life”, a horn-driven jazz pop song that keeps moving as it accounts for what a musical career really means in terms of passion, trade-offs and hard, exhaustive effort. Sharp lyrics heighten the tension as it builds and it’s unlike anything you’re likely to have heard from Melissa Manchester. The second song and the album’s first single, “Feelin’ for You”, which debuted last week at number two on the smooth jazz charts, is a sexy tune with an exquisite guitar solo by Keb’ Mo’. Melissa’s enchanting cover of the 50-year old Ronettes classic, “Be My Baby”, is followed by a catchy jazz duet with Al Jarreau, “Big Light”. Then, comes a breezy duet with Dionne Warwick, “Other End of the Phone”, Melissa Manchester’s only collaboration with the late Hal David, who wrote the lyric. “You Are My Heart”, a wedding song she wrote after the Supreme Court struck down the law forbidding gays from marriage, rounds out the optimistic first half of You Gotta Love the Life.
An Irving Berlin/Cole Porter pairing, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance/From This Moment On”, turns up the heat midway through the album. Other songs include “Claudia”, written by Melissa’s brother-in-law about her sister and featuring Dave Koz on saxophone, the ballad “Your Love is Where I Live”, reuniting her with Tom Snow, co-writer of the Grammy-winning 1982 hit single “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” (with Stevie Wonder on harmonica) and “No There There” which she wrote with Whiplash‘s Paul Reiser. An undulating, rising tune which opens each performance on her tour, “Open My Heart to Your Love”, is a hit-ready highlight.
You Gotta Love the Life gets better and I found more to appreciate with each listen. It slowly acquires a seriousness that’s frankly irresistible, because life is serious and Melissa Manchester writes and sings about life in all its glory, wonder and hardship, fulfilling an ethereal promise with what I would describe as reverence.
She saves the best for last with three final songs. “The Other One” reprises an early Melissa Manchester career theme, expressing with certainty a deeper, more committed, rediscovery of living for her own sake. “I Know Who I Am”, which she co-wrote for Tyler Perry’s 2010 movie For Colored Girls (originally recorded by Leona Lewis) is strong and stirring. A bonus track, “Something Wonderful” (Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein) from The King and I, is a richly guarded and romantic a cappella version which leaves the listener satiated while thinking and wanting more, an achievement and, hopefully, reward for this unique singer and songwriter, whose happily autonomous album is worthy of the effort with which it was obviously made.
Proving that yesterday’s established recording artist can evolve without sacrificing quality, Melissa Manchester’s first independent album is both an invitation to explore and a winking, sobering celebration of show business and life—making You Gotta Love the Life, funded by Melissa Manchester’s fans, a welcome return-to-form after 40 years in popular music.
(Click here to pre-order or buy You Gotta Love the Life as CD or download).
Melissa Manchester’s self-made You Gotta Love the Life, set for release on February 10 (click here to pre-order or buy as CD or download), combines a sense of triumph with grit. The recording artist’s first independent album, which, for purposes of full disclosure, I experienced during recording sessions and in post-production while storytelling for the artist’s social media, revels in that which one earns.
Melissa Manchester does it all on this record: gospel, blues, samba, ballads and pop, everything under the influence of jazz, in a variety of retrospective and introspective classic and original songs. But, after listening to You Gotta Love the Life on CD while driving and on mobile devices many times, I’ve found what I think is its theme. Throughout the winding, even wandering, journey, the mysterious and enduring singer and songwriter proclaims—and reclaims—ownership of her work and life.
Melissa Manchester, whom I recently interviewed about her career, including You Gotta Love the Life (read my exclusive interview about the new album here and my 2012 interview here), writes and sings like an emancipated woman. The Bronx native studied songwriting in New York with Paul Simon as an ingenue, backed up Bette Midler and emerged in the 1970s with such hits as “Come in from the Rain”, “Midnight Blue” and her transformative, anthemic rendition of Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager’s nuanced “Don’t Cry Out Loud”. Here, she produces with Terry Wollman a seasoned and authentic record.
Click to pre-order or buy
The 14-song collection begins with the propulsive title track, “You Gotta Love the Life”, a horn-driven jazz pop song that keeps moving as it accounts for what a musical career really means in terms of passion, trade-offs and hard, exhaustive effort. Sharp lyrics heighten the tension as it builds and it’s unlike anything you’re likely to have heard from Melissa Manchester. The second song and the album’s first single, “Feelin’ for You”, which debuted last week at number two on the smooth jazz charts, is a sexy tune with an exquisite guitar solo by Keb’ Mo’. Melissa’s enchanting cover of the 50-year old Ronettes classic, “Be My Baby”, is followed by a catchy jazz duet with Al Jarreau, “Big Light”. Then, comes a breezy duet with Dionne Warwick, “Other End of the Phone”, Melissa Manchester’s only collaboration with the late Hal David, who wrote the lyric. “You Are My Heart”, a wedding song she wrote after the Supreme Court struck down the law forbidding gays from marriage, rounds out the optimistic first half of You Gotta Love the Life.
An Irving Berlin/Cole Porter pairing, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance/From This Moment On”, turns up the heat midway through the album. Other songs include “Claudia”, written by Melissa’s brother-in-law about her sister and featuring Dave Koz on saxophone, the ballad “Your Love is Where I Live”, reuniting her with Tom Snow, co-writer of the Grammy-winning 1982 hit single “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” (with Stevie Wonder on harmonica) and “No There There” which she wrote with Whiplash‘s Paul Reiser. An undulating, rising tune which opens each performance on her tour, “Open My Heart to Your Love”, is a hit-ready highlight.
You Gotta Love the Life gets better and I found more to appreciate with each listen. It slowly acquires a seriousness that’s frankly irresistible, because life is serious and Melissa Manchester writes and sings about life in all its glory, wonder and hardship, fulfilling an ethereal promise with what I would describe as reverence.
She saves the best for last with three final songs. “The Other One” reprises an early Melissa Manchester career theme, expressing with certainty a deeper, more committed, rediscovery of living for her own sake. “I Know Who I Am”, which she co-wrote for Tyler Perry’s 2010 movie For Colored Girls (originally recorded by Leona Lewis) is strong and stirring. A bonus track, “Something Wonderful” (Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein) from The King and I, is a richly guarded and romantic a cappella version which leaves the listener satiated while thinking and wanting more, an achievement and, hopefully, reward for this unique singer and songwriter, whose happily autonomous album is worthy of the effort with which it was obviously made.
Proving that yesterday’s established recording artist can evolve without sacrificing quality, Melissa Manchester’s first independent album is both an invitation to explore and a winking, sobering celebration of show business and life—making You Gotta Love the Life, funded by Melissa Manchester’s fans, a welcome return-to-form after 40 years in popular music.
(Click here to pre-order or buy You Gotta Love the Life as CD or download).
Melissa Manchester’s self-made You Gotta Love the Life will be released on Feb. 10, 2015, according to her publicist. This is the first album since 2004 and she tells me that the new work celebrates 40 years of making music. I know this is true firsthand because I have previewed the CD, which was recorded near Los Angeles at Citrus College with help from Stevie Wonder, Al Jarreau, Keb’ Mo’, Dionne Warwick, Dave Koz and, in one of his last recordings, Joe Sample. While I’m helping Melissa, whom I interviewed for the Oscar-nominated singer’s last motion picture recording (read the interview here) to tell the tale of her distinctive new album, I can attest that the introspective You Gotta Love the Life is an achievement in the Grammy-winning singer’s exceptional career.
What a recording career it is, too. Following songwriting studies at NYU with Paul Simon and a stint with Bette Midler, Manchester’s solo career took off in earnest with her recording of the Peter Allen/Carole Bayer Sager anthem “Don’t Cry Out Loud” which garnered her first Grammy nomination for Best Pop Female Vocal Performance in 1979. She won the award in the same category four years later for “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” and two of her songs, “Through the Eyes of Love” and “The Promise,” were nominated for Academy Awards in the same year. Manchester’s songs have been recorded by Roberta Flack, Dusty Springfield, Alison Krauss, Stevie Nicks, Kenny Loggins and Barbra Streisand. She still writes for movies, including a gospel tune for Tyler Perry, “I Know Who I Am”, which she says she sings for herself on You Gotta Love the Life. Manchester, who played Mayim Bialik’s mother on NBC’s Blossom and co-created the ballroom dance extravaganza, Fascinating Rhythms, for the stage, is writing a musical and planning to tour to support the new record. She says she plans to perform at a release party in Dave Koz’s new lounge at Spaghettini in Beverly Hills.
The show’s and new album’s opener is the propulsive title track, You Gotta Love the Life. It’s Melissa Manchester‘s personal narrative about the hard, show business life and her press announcement today touts You Gotta Love the Life as an integration of the classic American songbook with jazz, ballads and samba featuring favorite cover songs, including “Something Wonderful” from The King and I, and new, original material, such as what turns out to be the late Hal David’s last recorded lyric. The first single, “Feelin’ for You”, premieres on January 19. Look for an interview and album review.
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In her premiere appearance at the Grammy Museum for its program “The Drop”, which highlights newly recorded releases on the distribution date, Melissa Manchester talked about her campaign to make an independent record, over 40 years in music and her artistic philosophy. Then, she took the stage and performed several songs. This was an intense, insightful interview (read my own interview with the singer-songwriter here) with the Grammy Foundation’s Scott Goldman. The sold-out audience at LA Live’s Grammy Museum, filled with musicians, record industry veterans, museum donors and those her daughter Hannah dubbed “fanchesters”, were held by every moment. Afterwards, the Grammy winner signed copies of her new album, You Gotta Love the Life, which she kicked off on Jan. 31 with two sold out shows at Spaghettini and the Dave Koz Lounge.
The campaign to support the release of her 20th album began in earnest, however, in the Clive Davis Theatre at the Grammy Museum, where she regaled the audience with tales of the album’s guest artist Stevie Wonder joining students for an impromptu version of “Superstition” at Citrus College where she recorded You Gotta Love the Life. There were also tales of working with Hal David, who studied journalism, on how that affected his writing what turns out to be his last lyric and of her singing partner on that tune, Dionne Warwick, and seeing her idol perform for the first time at the Copacabana. There were other famous singer, musician and star stories, too, including a story about working with Ella Fitzgerald, whom Melissa Manchester says made her more fully conscious of musical performance.
However, reminiscing wasn’t merely waxing nostalgic during Melissa Manchester’s album “drop” at the Grammy Museum. Each remembrance served the purpose of what one can learn from the creative process. She spoke of lessons from Sly and the Family Stone singing the anthemic line “thank you for letting me be myself,” singing with Barry Manilow, Patti Austin and Ashford and Simpson on backup vocals and wandering into the Children’s Television Workshop in Manhattan which was part of Sesame Street. She mentioned working as an uherette and as a parking attendant and talked about discovering from a country music artist the value of meeting an audience following a performance. And she recalled being a founding member of Bette Midler’s backup group the Harlettes and performing at gay bathhouses. She may have been ‘Toots in the middle’ but that didn’t stop her from seeing that Midler basked in the “radiance of her authenticity” while giving gays a sense of belonging before the Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village.
When asked, Melissa Manchester said that she wants her first independent album to reflect the joy of her life here and now. This came through during the conversation. As if to provide proof of concept without showing off, she then performed several songs, bringing the audience to their feet in unified applause, demonstrating not only that this pioneering artist loves the life; that part of the life which constitutes an audience—her peers, her fans, her fellow singers, musicians and artists—love her, too.
After studying songwriting with Paul Simon, performing with Bette Midler and breaking out on Bell Records before working with Arista mogul Clive Davis (
MELISSA MANCHESTER: Love songs, ballads, reinterpretations of classic songs. I sing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Something Wonderful” from The King and I as a prayer—as an a capella prayer—because that’s how the song lifted itself to me. There are songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin in a deeply Brazilian approach. I do “Be My Baby” as a deeply dreamy love song. These things were all worked out on stage. The stage is the lab, the workplace, where I invite the audience to come along on the journey. And they’re happy, too, because I let them know that, if they don’t like it, they have to let me know that, too. We were performing these songs for so long that it got to the point where one of my fans finally said ‘here’s a check—go and record this already, please’. The truth of my journey is that people are more interested in more music than in more merchandise. Now that the industry is so deeply changed at its core, that veil between me and the audience has been lifted and what’s been revealed is that the audience is so interested in the process—almost as much as I am—and yet, when I come onstage, they’re excited that I showed up and that I’m sharing new things. It’s as if people have such a sense of territorial investment in it that, even though they know how the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, they still get excited when the bunny shows up. This is unheard of because the whole thing about the industry and all of show business was all about the illusion. Now, I lift the veil on the illusion, they bring it down again and go ‘what a lovely surprise’ and it’s a wild, lovely aspect of time and experience—
