I think I’m beginning to understand why people don’t like Barry Manilow.

As I stated earlier in this column, my Dad is a huge Barry Manilow fan.  When I was 11, he received a Barry Manilow greatest hits album (I believe as a Christmas gift), and so at an early age I was exposed to one of the most hated artists of the seventies.  So here’s how my opinion has evolved over the years.

First off, to get my unpopular opinion out of the way for my ever-growing list of controversial opinions, let me state it here:  “Copacabana” sucks.  I hate the song’s bombastic trumpets, female choir, Manilow’s hammy performance, and those freaking TV Land keyboards with every fiber of my being.  I’ll go through it more when I do 1978, but I can’t think of another artist whose worst hit song is generally regarded as his/her best (Frank Sinatra had countless hits besides “Theme From New York, New York,” and while I don’t think “Teenage Dream” or “Firework” by Katy Perry are good, they’re at least better than “California Gurls”).  So what Barry Manilow songs do I like?

Well, after going through it in my head, I like two of his songs.  His best hit song is “Could It Be Magic,” which is a clever and exciting rewrite of Chopin’s Prelude In C Minor.  The other song I like from him is Dionne Warwick’s “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again.”  Although Barry didn’t perform or even write the track, he did produce it, and you can tell while listening his fingerprints are all over the song.

But there are two big problems I have with Barry.  The first relates to his songs.  When listening to hits like “Mandy,” “I Write The Songs,” and “Ready To Take A Chance Again,” you can tell Manilow followed a format with his songs.  Quiet opening, powerful chorus, overdramatic bridge, key change, bombastic final chorus.  My main problem with his much-hated “I Write The Songs” isn’t even that it’s about music, who writes the songs.  It’s that I hear it and think, “Well, it’s another Barry Manilow song.  Nothing different about this one.”  The second problem I have with Barry is a mantra, if you will.  A statement I came up with as a teenager, which I constantly repeat whenever I am confronted with his music.

A little Barry Manilow goes a long way.

Let me explain.  Barry’s music gets old fast.  There’s only so much of his performance style that I can take.  The bombastic performances, the sappy production… it’s all too much.  Listen to a single Barry Manilow song and you will not want to hear him again for two months.

So to get back on topic, in 1977 Barry Manilow had two hit songs. The second, “Looks Like We Made It,” was Manilow’s third number one in as many years, while the other hit single did reach the top ten.  Of the two, “Looks Like We Made It” is the better song.  While it’s yet another silly love song (what do you expect, it’s Barry freaking Manilow) and follows the same format of sappy song/key change/bombastic ending I went over earlier, it is a bit more creative in the writing format with it being about Manilow happy that he and his ex found true love, albeit with different people.  It may be yet another Barry Manilow song, but it’s better than most he had in its vein.

As for the other song, oh boy.  This is the song that made me understand the hate the man gets.

“Weekend In New England” – Barry Manilow

#10 peak (2 weeks, February 26-March 5, 1977)
#65 year-end, 19 weeks on chart

“Weekend In New England” is (well, almost) every Barry Manilow song ever made, shoved to the nth degree.  The quiet piano intro is just a warning flare that this song’s going to get really dramatic really fast.  And that’s exactly what happens.  At the two minute mark, the inevitable build-up happens and we get a preposterous combination of strings and harps that just come across as ridiculous, as Barry just begins to belt about how much HE LOVES THIS PERSON!  And what a shock, there’s a key change as the song as Manilow drowns in a sea of strings and harps.  When I began work on this project, I had a strong feeling this song was going to make the list.  It’s the most Barry Manilow-esque bad Barry Manilow song ever made, and of course it had to be mentioned here.

So let’s discuss why “Weekend In New England” is one of the worst songs of the year, and the song that proves that-

(record scratch)

Wait a minute, hold up! You know what I learned while doing this list?  As much as I may not be a fan of Barry Manilow, I at least respect the man enough so that I get angry when another performer jacks his style, takes all his trademarks, and does it a thousand times worse!

“It Was Almost Like A Song” – Ronnie Milsap

#16 peak (2 weeks, October 15-22, 1977)
#66 year-end, 22 weeks on chart (20 in 1977)

Ugggggghhhhhh…. Ronnie Milsap.

Ronnie Milsap was a country star in the 1970s and 80s, who scored a whopping 35 number one songs on the Country chart, four of which crossed over into the Top 20.  He was, by most accounts, pretty versatile as an artist, incorporating elements of R&B and rock in his sound.  Well I couldn’t have found a worse possible introduction to his work than this song.

I really don’t want to discuss this song.  First off is the obvious reason, that it sucks.  Second off, the song recycles points I just made about Barry Manilow, as well as previous entries.  And finally, just days before writing this entry, I learned that Milsap is blind.  He had almost no eyesight at birth, with a school houseparent finishing the job when he hit him at the age of 14 (old school discipline, my ass).  So not only am I going to be ripping on an artist I don’t know that much about (at least compared to other seventies artists), I’m going to be ripping on an artist with a much greater disability than what I have.  Schadenfruede is not for the faint of heart.

So let’s be fair here: this song wasn’t written by Milsap.  It was written by Archie Jordan, with lyrics by – no joke here – Hal David.  You know, the guy who wrote the lyrics to Burt Bacharach songs.  Some of the greatest songs of the entire sixties, including “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” “This Guy’s In Love With You,” “Walk On By,” “What The World Needs Now Is Love,” and two decades later, “Always Something There To Remind Me,” bear his name in the lyric credits.  So this isn’t just an embarrassing breakthrough hit, it’s also a baffling stumble by a legendary songwriter.

Remember I said that Milsap was a country artist?  Get that stupid label out of my face, because like how “I’m In You” by rock star Peter Frampton wasn’t a rock song, this isn’t a country song.  The only thing country about “It Was Almost Like A Song” is Milsap’s vocals with that familiar country twang.  Other than that, “It Was Almost Like A Song” is, straight up, a Barry Manilow song by a different artist.  The instrumentation, as we’ll get into, is similar, with the only primary exception being a harpsichord in place of a standard piano.  The lyrics are very similar too, as it’s yet another song about love and heartbreak.  I’ll just say it: this song is just “Weekend In New England 2: The Quickening.”  Not only is the structure of the song the same, they even use many of the same chords, in the same key (C major).  Both songs use the same C tonic, and the songs use similar chords, with both songs using G, Dm7, and Am among other chords.  And this is a big problem.

Say what you want about Barry Manilow.  While he doesn’t deserve all the hate he gets, he’s not a great artist.  But I will say this.  This is his style and format that he came up with.  This is his niche.  He at least came up with the formula.  Milsap and his team just took Manilow’s formula, nearly copied it wholesale, and claimed it as their own.  And the melody isn’t as creative as the “Weekend In New England” melody either, which at least had some variation in how Manilow presented it.  The vocal melody of “It Was Almost Like A Song” just uses the same pattern every time, slowly descending down its pentatonic scale.  And then, just over two minutes in, we get a solo from a synth that just sounds tinny, annoying, and completely incongruous with the rest of the instrumentation.  Why do you use such an artificial-sounding instrument for the solo, when the song is led by piano, harpsichord, and strings?  What purpose does this serve?  How, in any way, shape or form, does this resemble a tragic breakup?

But to be fair, this isn’t the worst song ever in the first two minutes or so.  With all these parts put together, it’s just another below average ballad, with a country singer who sounds out of place with the easy listening sound, that is probably about to make you fall asleep.  I mean, it’s bad, but it can’t be bad enough to make the top fi-

You knew this song was going to have a key change, didn’t you?

At the two and a half minute mark, the synth instrument suddenly switches keys, at which point the dam bursts and a flood of strings, female voices, and harps breaks through, abruptly cranking the song up to 11 and crushing any emotion the song had.  This intimate song about a breakup has turned into yet another bloated, overproduced, and painful pop song with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  And – what a shock – it’s the EXACT SAME KEY CHANGE as “Weekend In New England,” with the key shifting up half a step, making C# the tonic.  It’s even worse in execution than the previous songs I went over too, because while those key changes were done in a cheesy attempt to intensify the song, “It Was Almost Like A Song” uses the key change to turn on the melodrama.  With the original key used to frame the relationship, the key change sees Milsap devastated that his lover is gone.

Now my broken heart
Cries for you each night

Wow.  Not only is this needlessly dramatic, it’s whining and refusing to move on with life.  Again, say what you will about Barry Manilow, at least he didn’t whine and complain in his songs, at least not that I know of.  He just hoped that the right someone would come to him.  Hal, this is atrocious coming from a lyricist of your pedigree.  As for Ronnie… man, you overcame much bigger adversity than this!

Seriously, turn off this song.  I don’t want to hear it anymore.  Why aren’t you changing the station?

Much too sad to
WWWWRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

OH MY GOD!  I’M IN SO MUCH PAIN!  MAKE IT STOP!  MAKE IT STOP!  MAKE IT-

“Well, Dr. Winston, your eardrums have been successfully healed and you have regained partial hearing.  Your full hearing should return by the time the next entry begins.”

Ok.  Sorry about that.  Anyways, where was I?  Oh, yeah…

“It Was Almost Like A Song” is a terrible song.  There are tons of pop ballads like it in 1977, but it’s clearly the one that is the most derivative, and the final minute’s sonic excess with its rampant instrumentation and Milsap’s final high note is unforgivable.  Along with having to apologize to Barry Manilow, I also owe one to Mr. Engelbert Humperdinck, for thinking that “After The Lovin’” would be the worst example of such a song in 1977.  If only I knew…

But… I’ll be honest.  I’ve said a lot of mean things about this song, and Milsap may not deserve such harsh criticism.  So let’s give him one more chance.  His biggest hit came out a few years later in 1981, let’s see how that goes-

“(There’s) No Gettin Over Me” – Ronnie Milsap (1981)
But darling
There ain’t no getting over me

I quit.

(angrily walks off set)

UP NEXT: R&B in the seventies was amazing! There’s no way there’s going to be a terrible R&B song this decade at #3… right?

SOURCES

Larkin, Colin. The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. London: Virgin Books, 1997. Pg. 848-49. Print. 22 June 2022. Information gathered from Wikipedia.

Keys for “Weekend In New England” and “It Was Almost Like A Song” taken from Tunebat:
https://tunebat.com/Info/Weekend-in-New-England-Barry-Manilow/5XWmnuSMexMy6WRYz5rSfq
https://tunebat.com/Info/It-Was-Almost-Like-a-Song-Ronnie-Milsap/0OOyH1oDhrVxrTNLUg4MZJ

“Weekend In New England” and “It Was Almost Like A Song” chords taken from Ultimate Guitar:
https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/barry-manilow/weekend-in-new-england-chords-2547321.
https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/ronnie-milsap/it-was-almost-like-a-song-chords-688049

IMAGE SOURCES

It Was Almost Like A Song and (There’s) No Gettin’ Over Me album covers from Spotify

Image of Barry Manilow from Smooth Radio

“Weekend In New England” single cover from Wikipedia

Image of Ronnie Milsap from Whiskey Riff

GIF simulation of my eardrums exploding from Tenor

“Three hours later” title card from Spongebob Squarepants, taken from Pinterest