She walked into the studio one day in a white dress, which brought out a beautiful softness that I hadn’t seen in her before. I blurted out, “You look really great today!”
Cher smiled at the compliment, but she also looked at me like, “What do you want?”—as though I was just flattering her and had an agenda. I realized that through the years many people likely tried to charm Cher in pursuit of their agendas, so I was mindful of that while working with her.
Cher is a force of nature, incredibly savvy and great fun to be around. I produced two tracks on the album. This project was a great experience. I recorded and arranged the music and selected all of the musicians and backup singers, as well as booking the session and producing Cher’s vocal performance. This undertaking was very exciting and more than a little intimidating, especially with “I Found Someone,” because everyone felt certain our song would be a hit.
The high expectations made the days all the more intense and stressful. The project was a revelation from start to finish, including seeing up close what life was like for a multimedia star of her stature. Publicists, stylists, agents, managers, dressers, admen, photographers, magazine reporters, television reporters, and I think even perfume designers swarmed our studios, but I had a record to produce.
She is the most attractive conglomerate I’ve ever known. Our album was just the sound track to a stream of commercials, television appearances, concert tours, a major motion picture with serious Oscar buzz (Moonstruck), and an entire line of cosmetics.
Cher provided my first view of the highest level of celebrity and stardom. The disruptions distracted me at first, but she was a professional throughout our production. In the end, Cher proved to be so strong and in control that I just had to marvel at her. My goal was to deliver a hit record that would reach her existing audience and bring in new fans, too, and I felt that mission was accomplished. David Geffen called and thanked me for delivering the comeback record they’d wanted for her.
Even better, Cher sent me an autographed photo with this note: “Michael, I’m wearing white panties under my dress. Just kidding. I’m not wearing any.”
She signed it, “The Daughter of the Devil.” I think she was teasing me because apparently someone at the label had said she could be difficult to work with. I hadn’t found her difficult at all. Cher was amazing. I just was so busy that we really didn’t spend much time in the studio together, except to produce her vocals. I agreed without hesitation to work with her as a producer on a couple of songs for her next album.
WRITING FROM THE HEART
Teaming up with Cher, John Kalodner, and David Geffen was a step into the stratosphere of the entertainment business. I’d suddenly come a very, very long way after struggling a long time as an artist, waiting tables in a restaurant, and commuting on a rickety motor scooter with a shoestring for an accelerator. While putting in long hours on the first Cher album, I also was quietly coping with serious turmoil in my personal life. When I think about that time, I recall a moment in the recording studio in which I was telling myself, You can’t be thinking about your divorce while Cher is singing into the microphone right in front of you.
Even more ironic, when I was recording “When a Man Loves a Woman” for my own album, my attorneys kept calling me as they prepared for my divorce. I don’t recommend talking to your divorce lawyer before walking into the studio to sing a love song, but thankfully the music took me where I needed to go.
My struggles as a rock singer had been stressful on my marriage, but succeeding as a songwriter, jingle singer, record producer, and then ultimately as a pop R & B singer did nothing to save it. The financial strains on our relationship were all but eliminated with those successes, but in pursuing the opportunities that came with them, I was pulled farther and farther from home.
I felt blessed by my career success and I wanted to build upon it, which took a toll on my personal life. The long hours and travel left not nearly enough time for my family. As the child of divorced parents, I was aware of the lasting impact a split would have on our daughters. As I noted earlier, I have never figured out how to achieve a perfectly “balanced life” while working at the level I aspire to achieve and maintain, but later, when my girls moved in with me and traveled with me, we had some incredible times together.
During this difficult period, I wrote one of my few songs to come directly from my ongoing experience and emotions, and it proved to be one of my most successful collaborations. I wrote “We’re Not Making Love Anymore” with the queen of songwriters, Diane Warren, who had become a good friend and collaborator. We’d both had our first hits on the same album with Laura Branigan five years earlier. Diane had sent seven more songs into the Top 10 since then. She was on a roll that still continues. The last time I checked, her songs were on albums and records that had sold more than 150 million copies and I’m proud to say that more than 50 million of those were mine. The success we had together helped her negotiate a very lucrative publishing agreement, so we both benefited from our collaborations.
Diane and I met after the Branigan album was released. A mutual friend introduced us, and we quickly realized that we had much in common beyond the source of our first hit songs. We began meeting for lunch whenever I was in Los Angeles. Then we bonded further during a ten-day glasnost trip to Moscow for a Songwriters Summit cultural exchange program with twenty-five top U.S. songwriters and artists, including Cyndi Lauper, Desmond Child, Barry Mann, and Mike Stoller.
Lunch and dinner with Diane were not for the faint of heart. She would sometimes bring one of her pet birds, usually a parrot named Butt Wings. I’d beg her not to bring the birds. They may have been parrots, but they acted like raptors. Or crap-tors.
Devilish Diane would hide her giant freaking parrot under her coat until we were seated and then she’d unleash it upon me and other unsuspecting diners. Within minutes, the raucous bird would be strutting on the white tablecloths at the Ivy in Beverly Hills.
“Diane, please!” I’d say.
“What?” she’d reply, pretending not to notice.
Diane was only slightly better behaved than her bird. She had a tendency to toss cutting comments and provocative observations like ninja stars across the room. Between Diane and Butt Wings, I never knew when we might get thrown out of a really nice restaurant. Usually Diane would temper her flamethrowing with a funny spin so people didn’t know whether to laugh or to take offense, but they were almost always shocked.
She targeted me, too, but I returned fire. We had a contentious working relationship, so Diane took to introducing me to her friends as “my brother from hell.” I countered by saying that working with Diane was a day at the beach—Normandy, 1944.
Whenever I think I might be winning my war with Warren, she pulls out one story that slays me every time. Shortly after my singing career took off, we were working in Santa Monica. We’d gone to lunch and we were sitting in my rental car in the parking lot talking before returning home. This woman came walking toward the car and I said to Diane, “She must want an autograph.”
Instead, the woman, who was visibly irritated, said, “Can you please move your car? You are blocking mine!”
Diane never let me forget that story, and I deserved it.
Fortunately, we share a love for songwriting and, despite being loners by nature, we found ways to work together that produced some beautiful songs. I loved those moments when I’d see her antennae go up in a restaurant. A wicked smile would cross her face after she’d overheard something or had a creative flash. “I have a title,” she’d say.
When we weren’t throwing lightning bolts at each other, we wrote up a storm. If she came up with something she loved, Diane called me no matter what the hour. I was always eager to listen to her songs. She is a genius, with an unbelievable work ethic. She is also fiercely protective of her creations, like a Tiger Mom who follows her songs through every stage of their lives.
Most songwriters are very particular about how their so
ngs are produced and recorded. We want the key notes and chords to be played as written so the song conveys the emotion we intended. Some demand to be present in the recording studio to make certain the original blueprint is followed. Often producers choose a song because they believe it will be a hit, but then they’ll go with an arrangement that strays far from the songwriter’s intent, which we feel makes it less likely to be the very “hit” they first heard and were drawn to. The producer can be slick or heavy-handed and overproduce a record, too, making it more about their own sound than the song itself. Maybe it’s not a hit. Maybe it’s simply a great song, but the full power of it will not be shared with the world. As my manager, Christina Kline, once said, producers can get so focused on the technical aspects and other sonic elements of a recording that these elements can overshadow or distract from the great song they have right in front of them. They can often miss “the soul of it.” And I love that as a metaphor for what can spill over into all areas of our existence. I’m always wary of missing the soul of it all when my songs are recorded. I don’t want the heart of it to be lost in the production process. The drum sound alone can distract from the lead vocal and alter the intention of the song. Too many effects on the lead vocal can bury the emotions expressed by the singer. The lyrics and melody are brought to life by the soul of the voice.
Once you’ve got the goods, the next phase is just as important. In my New Haven grammar school, L. W. Beecher, the teachers planted trees and had us tend to them by watering, fertilizing, staking, and fencing the seedlings to make sure they had the chance to live and thrive over a long life. I think about my songs, especially when they’re released as singles, in that same way. You have to protect them in the initial stage of launch. Sometimes you have to fight like hell to make sure the record label and the promotion team are doing absolutely everything they can to make sure the song will survive on the radio. I’ve never met a songwriter who didn’t want his or her creations to be huge hits embraced by millions of people. We’re artists and we’re competitive, too. Berry Gordy knew this when he created the Motown hit-making machine. His songwriters shared office space in Detroit at the house turned headquarters marked by a sign that read—and still reads—“Hitsville USA.” Gordy put his songwriting teams under one roof, so he wouldn’t have to motivate them. They drove one another because every one of them wanted to have the No. 1 hit record.
Lamont Dozier told me that Motown’s songwriters would walk by one another’s offices, hear great songs being cranked out, and run back to their rooms to come up with their own hits. The songwriter Barry Mann told me that all of the songwriters in the famed Brill Building in New York City would check one another’s work and vacation schedules because they were afraid to be out of the office if everyone else was working. They finally resolved that problem by taking all of their vacations together—and going to the same place, he said.
It wasn’t always peace, love, and understanding inside Motown’s creative dens, either. Fittingly, another of Motown’s biggest hits was “War.” When you put creative, driven, and competitive songwriters together, there are bound to be some clashes. Holland, Dozier, and Holland had their share. Diane Warren and I did, too. Neither of us lacks for opinions, and we’re not exactly shy about expressing them. I’m not saying we caused the Northridge Earthquake, but we were working together in Los Angeles when it rocked the city in 1994.
Have you heard the creative process described as “opening a vein”? Diane offered to cut my jugular several times. She is a tough customer, but Diane wouldn’t be able to craft such gorgeous love songs if she didn’t have a soft side, too.
Alone in a Manhattan apartment late one night, I tried to capture my emotional pain in a song. The title “We’re Not Making Love Anymore” came to me and I wrote the first verse. Then I called Diane and played her a little of the song on keyboards I had set up in the apartment.
She was all over it in a flash, singing out more lyrics faster than I could write them down.
“So do you like it?” I said. “If you do, let’s meet in L.A. on Friday and finish it.”
Diane is not one to squander an inspired songwriting opportunity. We met in West Hollywood at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, which now caters to musicians by providing instruments and sound equipment for guests. I’d ordered a set of keyboards and we spent several days crafting the rest of the song.
Once we’d completed the song, Diane and I debated which artists to send it to. We felt “We’re Not Making Love Anymore” deserved someone mature enough to sing it with the right kind of passion, which means the right voice as well as the right life experience. We agreed the perfect match would be Barbra Streisand, who possessed that rare combination of a Stradivarius-quality voice and a gift for storytelling in song. Of course, Streisand was at the top of every songwriter’s list. Placing a new song in her hands was more difficult than arranging a personal audience with the pope.
Streisand had protective and hard-to-please producers who screened all the material sent to her. Luckily, we had a man on the inside. We reached out to Jay Landers, a member of Streisand’s inner circle and one of my favorites in the music industry. Jay, who cast me as the recording artist for the Hercules theme song, “Go the Distance,” was an A and R guy who always got it right. He had worked with Laura Branigan, too, and he has been executive producer on twenty-two Streisand albums at last count, as well as the music supervisor for most of her DVDs and concerts—and that’s just where his résumé begins. He’s been instrumental in the success of records for everyone from Frank Sinatra to James Taylor to Josh Groban, and he’s produced sound tracks for many of Disney’s greatest movies, including Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
Diane and I sent “We’re Not Making Love Anymore” to Jay because we knew him and also because he has a great ear for hit songs. He agreed that the song was perfect for Barbra, so he handed it up the star chain to another heavy hitter—one who would become a major player in my own recording career—record producer and songwriter Walter Afanasieff. Like Jay, Walter has produced major movie sound tracks, including the one for Titanic. My album Time, Love & Tenderness marked Walter’s explosive entrance into the world of pop music. He had been producing Kenny G, and I met him at one of Kenny’s shows backstage, where Kenny suggested that Walter and I write together. The next thing I knew, Walter was in my hotel room with a truckload of high-tech gear and his keyboards. While we wrote, Walter was programming drums, bass, piano, and strings into his computers, basically building a record that sounded better than most of what you hear on the radio. I promptly made a call to Tommy Mottola to introduce him to Walter. Tommy then signed Walter to Sony and set him up in a state-of-the-art studio where he produced many major artists, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey among them.
Walter and Jay not only gave the song their blessing, they selected it to be Barbra’s next single. They invited me to help produce the vocal session when she recorded it. I was honored beyond words at their invitation, but Streisand’s production team was so tight and so experienced I didn’t think they needed me in the studio throwing my two cents in. I preferred to let her Grammy-winning producers do their jobs. I was more comfortable staying in the background, but close enough to send more songs to Barbra’s team.
I had no doubt that Barbra would sing the hell out of “We’re Not Making Love Anymore”—and not just because she is one of the world’s greatest singers. I began writing the song from the heart during my divorce, and Barbra sang it from the heart in the studio. I was not at all shocked when her single immediately hit the Top 10 of the Adult Contemporary charts in 1989. She then made it the first song on her next album, A Collection: Greatest Hits & More, which went double platinum that same year.
History offers many examples in which emotional pain was the catalyst for artistic achievement, but I don’t know if success has ever truly salved the wounded hearts of the creators. I can speak only for myself. As much as that song means to me—I’m proud and thankful to have co-w
ritten it—I’ll never be able to hear it without associating it with a sad time in my life.
KISS AND TELL
I’ve had many interesting experiences while working at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, my West Coast headquarters for many years. Another frequent guest was the distinguished actor Richard Harris, who once walked up and introduced himself to me while singing the lyric “How am I supposed to live without you.” It was like having King Arthur or Oliver Cromwell (two of his biggest roles) serenading me.
You never know what stars you’ll encounter at the Marquis. This landmark hotel, which opened in 1963 as the designated inn for the new Playboy West Coast headquarters nearby, is a Hollywood celebrity haunt that also serves as a creative hothouse for people in my business. Along with all the other amenities of a first-class hotel, the Marquis houses the noted NightBird Recording Studio in its basement.
I’ve often worked in my Marquis hotel room when writing songs, either alone or with a co-writer. Once the song is ready to be recorded on a demo, there are many studios in the immediate area, including the one in the basement. One of my favorite writing sessions at the Sunset was the one in which I crafted another made-to-order song for a group that might surprise you. One day at the hotel, I ran into my friend Bruce Kulick, who had co-founded the rock band Blackjack with me years earlier and had played on several albums with me.
This talented musician and songwriter had become the lead guitarist for KISS in 1984, after the band went through some personnel changes. By the time he arrived, they’d wiped off the face paint they had worn since the early 1970s. When I met up with Bruce at the Marquis, he mentioned that KISS co-founder Paul Stanley was also staying at the hotel, and that they’d talked about asking me to help Paul write a song for their new album.
The Soul of It All Page 14