The beauty and the mystery of song collaboration is that it is not unlike making love. No one, other than the two people involved, will ever know what went down in the piano room or the bedroom. I’d certainly collaborated with dozens of young singers who could not write worth a lick, leaving me to compose, note for note, word for word, the entire song, for only 50 per cent of the credit. So I could see how people might assume that when I was 22 and writing with the accomplished Barry Mann, I was like one of those celebrity pups who couldn’t string a sentence together but got half of the copyright anyway.
“What’s wrong?” Calder asked, as I started laughing. Hysterically.
After all these years, all the fulsome praise and the media eviscerations, the truckloads of royalty dollars, the rude interruption of reading The New Yorker only to find That Song discussed in a story on Don Rickles—finally I was being told that I had nothing to do with Sometimes at all.
Most of the time, I can bop around Toronto, the city I still live in, thinking I’m anonymous. On one recent morning, though, as I left a taxi, my cabbie said, “Hey, Mr. Hill! You should get someone to re-record that stupid song of yours.”
Busted again.
“Yeah,” I conceded, “it is a stupid song. But for a stupid song, it’s done okay for me.”
And that’s the thing. A song can be stupid, yet smart. Horrible, yet brilliant. It’s the songs that elicit no response, the ones that conjure neither excitement nor disdain, that are doomed to fail. But really, let’s face it—when you break it down, a song is, after all, just a f–king song. (Now the guys who discovered insulin, Banting and Best—they’re my rock stars.)
But I got the last word on that cabbie. Call me a glutton for punishment, a musical masochist, or maybe I merely wanted to show a different side to that song. A stripped-down, as in close-to-naked, rendition—piano and voice—so that maybe, just maybe, this oh-so-cursed and blessed song can be heard anew. Tucked in amongst 14 new songs of mine on my soon-to-be released CD, Intimate, is That Song. Can a lived-in, 55-year-old voice infuse a depth, a colour, some middle-aged soul, into a song that a voice at 22 simply could not contain? I suppose the song was too big for me then. But it’s not now.
