I Wrote That One, Too . . . Read online

  Barbra heard the song and wanted to do it. With Barbra singing and Arif Mardin producing, it was getting pretty impossible to not be excited.

  I’m not totally sure how many times Arif tried tracking the song—at least twice, as I remember. He called me one day from New York and said Barbra was unhappy with two of the arrangements that he had started. He asked me who played on the demo, because Barbra was adamant about following the simplicity of the demo recording.

  I confessed that it was just Dean and me who played on the demo, and Arif asked if I wanted to play on the recording to recreate the exact voicings. I was flattered, but I suggested he use either Randy Kerber or Randy Waldman, who were both gifted musicians and far better piano players than I was. They had also done so many sessions with me that they would know exactly what I had done on the demo. Dean Parks on guitar was a no-brainer as well, since he was on the original with me.

  The final track was beautifully arranged and produced, and with that the first song George and I had written together was recorded by the legendary Barbra Streisand. What an incredible way to start a collaboration.

  George Green and I went on to write a total of ten wonderful songs together over the next several years, five of them recorded by B. J. Thomas, Vanessa Williams, and Christopher Cross. George passed away at the young age of fifty-nine, way too soon. He was a lovely man, a friend, and a brilliant poet.

  Back to Barbra.

  As far as I can remember, I’ve only cried in the studio three times, and all three were related to Barbra Streisand projects.

  The first time was in the studio, listening to Barbra’s vocal for the first time, with her standing three feet in front of me. It was an overwhelming feeling, knowing that it really doesn’t get any better than this. I savored the moment as I unsuccessfully tried to hide my tears, not wanting to look like a complete idiot in front of everybody.

  The ultimate icing on the cake was when the album was released and they decided to title it Higher Ground. When I proudly gave a CD to my mom, and I saw her tear up, her tears were contagious. She was bursting with pride, and I was so humbled and happy that I had made my mom proud that I cried as well.

  A couple of years later, Jay would play another one of my songs for Barbra’s beautiful A Love Like Ours project. This was a collection of love songs dedicated to her husband, James Brolin. She recorded a song of mine called “It Must Be You,” cowritten with Stephony Smith, which thankfully made the album.

  It was twelve years later that I got to cry for the third time in relation to a Barbra Streisand project. Barbra was getting ready to start an ambitious project called Partners, an album of duets with some of the greatest male duet partners on the planet. All but two of the songs were remakes of her biggest hits, which were all done with all-new arrangements: “People” with Stevie Wonder, “The Way We Were” with Lionel Richie, and “Somewhere” with Josh Groban were just a few of the amazing tracks included.

  It was an unbelievable project, and I absolutely wanted to be a part of it.

  Jay called and told me that Barbra had always wanted to duet with Willie Nelson, and Jay and Barbra were interested in using one of my songs. However, Jay wanted the song to be rewritten in more of a “friendship” tone, as opposed to the traditional love song that it initially was intended to be.

  I was up for the challenge, as I wanted to be on the album. I also didn’t feel as if I was compromising my integrity, because I definitely could not visualize Willie and Barbra doing a love song together. Plus, Jay’s rewrite ideas for the song were really good ones. He had some great thoughts as to how to tailor it specifically for them.

  Bobby Tomberlin and I finished the song, “I’d Want It to Be You.” I did a fairly elaborate mockup demo, with Kellie Coffey and Troy Johnson singing the duet. The harmonies were totally mapped out, Barbra loved it, and it was a go.

  The problem was, Willie couldn’t sing it—at least not in the way we had imagined the duet.

  It was too much of a stretch, musically, and in fairness to Willie, not really the kind of song that’s in his wheelhouse. Also, when he was paired with Barbra, it was clear that there was no way the duet was going to work.

  I was heartbroken. We were in jeopardy of losing the song altogether from the project.

  Jay asked me if I knew someone else who could sing it with Barbra.

  He suggested Garth Brooks, George Strait, or Keith Urban.

  I tried Garth and George. I had good relationships with people who could easily get in touch with both of them. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit into their respective recording plans, as both were in semi-retirement at the time.

  I called Jay to report the bad news. While we were talking, I thought of someone else who would be fantastic to sing the song with Barbra: Blake Shelton.

  There was a brief dead silence over the phone. Finally, Jay said, “Who?”

  “Blake Shelton, from The Voice. He’s on fire. The show’s hotter than American Idol. He’s a great-looking country singer with a big voice to match. And women love him. He’d sing the doors off this song, and it’d be the perfect marriage with Barbra’s voice.”

  Jay resisted a bit, giving me the list of partners already on the album, including Stevie Wonder, Michael Bublé, Billy Joel, and Lionel Richie. He wanted a bigger name.

  He had to hang up at that point as Barbra was calling on the other line. Ten minutes later, he called me back and asked me, “Do you know Blake Shelton?”

  “I do actually. What made you change your mind?”

  He told me that he mentioned Blake Shelton to Barbra and that she loves The Voice . . . and she especially loves Blake Shelton.

  I got the song to Blake through Narvel Blackstock, Blake’s manager and Reba McEntire’s longtime husband and manager. I had known Narvel for quite some time, having worked with Reba before.

  Blake loved the song and was both excited and honored to be involved in the project. First we had to rewrite a few of the Willie-specific lyric lines to fit Blake, and then we scheduled the session. Blake was in Los Angeles, filming The Voice, and he came in to sing his parts to Barbra’s partially prerecorded vocal.

  We did his vocals at Walter Afanasieff’s home studio, which coincidentally used to be my house, two owners previous to Walter owning it. It was like being home again. Blake did a remarkable job, and Barbra ended up resinging some of her vocals to better match with him.

  “Partners” was produced by Walter A. and Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, and it shipped #1 the first week, making Barbra the first recording artist in history to have #1 albums spanning six decades—a record unlikely ever to be broken.

  Sitting at the orchestra sweetening session, off to the side of the huge control room at Fox Studios, I cried unapologetic tears as I watched Bill Ross conducting this incredible orchestra, including so many of my friends, sweetening our song.

  Once again, I was reflecting back to the beginning of both my lifelong love of music and my career, and feeling so overwhelmingly appreciative of how and where the road had taken me.

  2

  What’s Wrong with Our Son?

  I was not your typical toddler.

  The first time I heard music, I was a baby, banging my head against the lead-painted crib and making guttural noises. While my parents were worrying about how to pay for the long years of therapy I was going to need, I was hearing a full-scale orchestra. For hours, I would bang, sing, and visualize. Clearly, I didn’t know what an oboe or clarinet or violin was. I had never heard music, but I was definitely hearing something and I was visualizing it as colorful plasmic bubbles.

  At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Steve Dorff is crazy. I’ve picked up this book and it’s written by a nut job.” Bear with me. The bubbles were real. It’s difficult to explain, and to this day I’m still not sure I truly understand it myself.

  The first conscious memory
I have of hearing music was when I was still in the crib. I was laying on my stomach and making noises that my parents swore was me either humming or singing.

  I know that few adults can remember anything that happened to them before the age of three; however, I do vaguely remember the head banging. The brain, as we’ve all been told, is this mysterious center, most of which is untapped. Sometimes I can’t remember what I did last Thursday, but somehow I can vividly recall things I did half a century ago. I admit it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  Back to the plasmic bubbles.

  I remember seeing them as a baby. I know this because I still see them. Whenever I hear music—as an infant, a child, a teen, or even sometimes still today—it is often accompanied by shapes of color that I see if I close my eyes. The best way I can describe these shapes is that they move in depth, as opposed to left to right. The first time I ever saw a lava lamp as a teenager, I remember thinking, “Ah, someone else figured out how to bottle these crazy things!”

  These shapes, these plasmic bubbles, represented intervals, tones, or notes; musical pictures that went along with what I was hearing.

  When I tried to describe what I had experienced as a kid, a psychologist friend of mine told me, “It sounds as if you’ve experienced the phenomenon of synesthesia.”

  There are people who see numbers as colors in their heads, sounds as smells—all sorts of crossover of the senses. It is not completely understood because few people actually, truly experience it. This would maybe explain those crazy-shaped plasma bubbles that I would see when closing my eyes while either listening or dreaming up music. I only know that it was an experience that came to me as naturally as breathing.

  I often still wonder if it explains, in some way, the reasons why I was able to identify chord structures, intervals, and time signatures without having taken formal training. Don’t get me wrong: there is so much I wish I had learned formally. It would have saved me countless hours of banging that same head against a wall, trying to figure out what a great studio musician easily figures out in twenty seconds. At any rate, that is where my musical journey began.

  Bubbles became my toddler mind’s version of notes.

  My sister was nine years older than me, and she took piano lessons. As soon as I could walk, I would trudge over to the rented piano; first I’d bang on the low notes, then I’d bang on the high notes. My parents, who by this time were probably wondering what planet I came from, assumed I was having a musical seizure . . . but I was telling a story. To me, the low keys were a bear and the high keys were birds.

  Eventually, the pounding took shape, and my parents realized there was something there.

  I was trying to communicate. The trouble was, no one was listening.

  My parents should probably never have been married. They were both alcoholics, with a strong penchant for vodka, and in the evenings, when I was a little boy, I was kept awake by horrific arguing, glass breaking, cries, and screams.

  So I kept retreating into my mind. Into my bubbles.

  I grew up in Queens, New York, in a middle-class family. My parents divorced when I was four, so I didn’t have the most functional upbringing. The closest thing to a male figure in my life was Uncle Phil. As you may well guess, “Uncle” Phil was not a proper blood-relative uncle but my mother’s favorite suitor. The minute dad exited the front door of our apartment, Uncle Phil entered. He was like a surrogate dad to me. I was too young to realize he was banging my mom, so I took him at face value. There was probably an Uncle Bill and an Uncle Pete and an Uncle Bob around, too, but Uncle Phil was around the most. And he was a good guy. He was someone I could count on, he loved my mom and my sister, and, most importantly, he used to buy me albums. The second a new Beatles album came out, I would lock myself in my room and not leave until I knew every note of every song.

  Dad still visited quite often, maybe once a month for a day or two, but he was more of a stranger to me. When Dad came back to visit, Uncle Phil would disappear and everyone would play nice. My sister, my mother, and I would all be on our best behavior, and everything would play out functionally until dinnertime, when the booze came out and the arguing began. My sanctuary was my little bedroom, where I’d put a pillow over my head . . . and retreat to the orchestra in my head.

  It was the only thing that would drown out the dysfunction that was screaming through the door from the other side of the small apartment.

  The plasmic bubbles stayed with me, and I continued to orchestrate in my head, often to everyday activities. When I was eight, I was in a snowball fight with a bunch of friends in my neighborhood of Fresh Meadows, Queens. The point of a snowball fight is generally not to get hit in the face by flying ice, but I found myself standing still in the middle of the crossfire as snow was being hurled at my head from every direction on the compass. I stayed still, however, because I was musicalizing each impact: each crash, thrash, swish, plink, and plunk.

  I musicalized each new snowball as it slammed into me, adding it to the symphony in my head. I didn’t duck. And that was the moment, while I was purposefully being pummeled, when I think I realized that I was different.

  Everyone has that moment in their life when they know. When they know what they’re supposed to do. When they realize what they are meant to do. For most people it doesn’t usually come until they are in college; for many, it happens somewhere midlife when they realize they are destined to do something even though the trajectory of their life has navigated them in a different direction.

  Mine happened when I was eight. When I was getting beaned in the head.

  Yes, it hurt and yes, it was cold. But it was a small price to pay for discovering my destiny.

  I knew I wanted to learn as much as I could about the music I was hearing, I just didn’t know that the traditional route that most musicians took would not be my particular road. I don’t think I took either of Frost’s two roads that diverged into a wood; instead, I think I managed to find the unpaved, unmarked path and determinedly followed that one.

  3

  Kicked Out of Music Class

  I never took traditional piano lessons because I kept insulting the teachers.

  It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t mean to insult them. I just heard things differently than they did. I did it my own way, and music teachers seem to like to do it their own way.

  Apparently, if you want to pass a class, you shouldn’t correct the teacher.

  The biggest problem with hearing music in your head is that a) you think that you can do it better than everyone else, and b) you usually can.

  It started with my sister Sherry’s piano teacher, Mr. Teitlebaum. He loved my sister because my sister was the perfect student. She did exactly what she was told: practice scales, learn a song, repeat. She was nine years older than I was, and she started taking piano lessons when she was twelve and a half. At four years old, I remember listening to her practice the same song over and over and over again. Not knowing any better, I would crawl up on the piano bench and could somehow play the song she had been laboring over for weeks, better than she could.

  I’ve always wondered why she didn’t try to break all of my fingers. My mother thought it best to get my sister’s piano teacher to give me some lessons.

  That turned out to be a small disaster.

  When it came time to teach me, Mr. Teitlebaum told my parents that I was unteachable. This was because I played songs the way I heard them in my head rather than in the cookie-cutter way he tried to teach them to me. He told my mom I was undisciplined, insolent, and insubordinate. I told him he was pitchy when he tried to sing along, and that he didn’t really play in the pocket. Of course I didn’t know that music terminology at that age, but he had terrible time, and I sensed it.

  He kindly requested that I stop being his student.

  When I was ten, my sister got the part of Miss Adelaide in her college production o
f Guys and Dolls. Listening to Frank Loesser’s music made a huge impression on me. I loved the songs, and I loved the magic of the theater. After the show, my sister rushed out, expecting adulation. Instead, I gave her a perfunctory hug, said how much I loved the show, and told her that she was great even though she was a quartertone flat most of the time when she sang.

  I wasn’t trying to be an asshole; I was a kid and she was hurting my ears.

  Yes, I think I recognized early on that I didn’t listen to music in the traditional way that most people do. My ears would always focus in on what the instruments of the orchestra were doing, as opposed to just listening to the vocalist singing the song. I was far more interested in what countermelodies the strings or brass might be playing, the use and registers of the woodwinds, and little things like orchestra bells, timpani, and harp glisses. For me, the real emotion of a record came from these backing elements.

  The actual words to a song were secondary.

  Even as a young teenager, there were three great orchestrators I loved listening to: Peter Matz, Don Sebesky, and Herb Bernstein. It was important to me to read the liner notes and see who was putting these records together. Instinctively, I always heard what they were doing. I listened to all those counter lines and the way they used the instruments to complement the singer and not get in the way.

  Listening to and studying them became the beginnings of my musical education.

  I didn’t know how to sit down and write, but I understood why they were doing it, and by listening to them I began to learn how to do what they were doing. I translated what I was hearing into the orchestra in my head and somehow began to visualize how to do that as well.

  It was a comprehensive, if not bizarre, way of listening for a young kid who didn’t even know what a music note looked like, let alone a cello, oboe, flute, or violin. I didn’t know the terminology of woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. I just knew that I wanted to be a part of this world. This early recognition and love for orchestral music served as the foundation for everything I’ve done as a composer and arranger, and was significant to why and how I was able to instinctively understand the mechanics of orchestration and song structure without any formal training.