Harry Connick: "I’d let Clive hear what I’d done, and he’d be like, ‘That’s 100 beats a minute; it should be 97 beats a minute.’ Or he would say, ‘That sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock movie to me.’ "
'Clive kept saying, 'Why aren't you selling millions of records?' And I kept saying, 'I don't know, man.'"
Harry Connick Jr. was raised a Catholic and sang for the Pope last year, so he knows that when you say the catechism, you're supposed to have the right answers. But he never could find the right answer when producer Clive Davis, considered by some to be a Pope-like figure in popular music, kept prodding the Grammy-winning singer and pianist with that same perplexing question.
It's not as if there aren't a lot of listeners milling around Connick's end of the music business, where he has been a star since his 1989 soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally . Michael Bublé has sold millions of records for Warner since coming on the scene a few years ago, and, unlike Connick, he doesn't play the piano, or write his own songs, or do his own arrangements. Bublé can't play hot New Orleans funk, as Connick did for a couple of albums in the mid-nineties, or improvise deep jazz instrumentals with Branford Marsalis, as he did two years ago on Occasion , a record on the saxophonist's boutique label.
"There's a chasm of difference between me and Michael, but from a marketing point of view, there probably isn't," Connick said, in his broad New Orleans drawl. If he didn't know that before, he sure learned it last year, after Davis arrived at Sony Music following its merger with BMG, where Davis (as founder of Arista Records) had helped Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys and many others find the big brass ring that has mostly eluded Connick during his 22-year recording career.
Davis proposed that they work together on an album, the kind of producer-driven, market-minded disc that Connick thought he'd never do, "not in a million years." He was used to being in charge of pretty much everything, including the song selection, the arrangements, the conducting and the mixing and mastering.
But he said yes, drawn by the Davis mystique, the challenge of going against his own grain, and yes, the possibility of making a record that would sell millions. And so began a long process that Connick, during a frank and sometimes startling conversation in Toronto, compared at one point to the breaking of a horse that has never known a bridle.
"I was like a colt at first, they had to break me in," he said. "It's not going to break me for the rest of my life, it's just one project."
Davis's concept was simple: He wanted "songs that everybody knows," in "accessible arrangements." He didn't want to wow everyone with Connick's many talents, but to head straight for Memory Lane, and to remind people, in a plain but artful way, why that can be such an agreeable address.
"It's like I'd been doing art films, and somebody gave me a huge budget to do a giant Titanic -like picture," Connick said. "It's no less difficult to make, it's just that there's a lot more cooks in the kitchen."
Mainly it was just that one other cook that Connick had to come to terms with. He and Davis met every Wednesday at 1 p.m. for four months, picking the songs, discussing the arrangements, and finessing the tone of the record, which came out this week under the title Your Songs.
Connick said he often felt that he and Davis were speaking different languages, especially when they got down to his demo versions of the songs. "I'd let Clive hear what I'd done, and he'd be like, 'That's 100 beats a minute; it should be 97 beats a minute.' Or he would say, 'That sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock movie to me.' He would use a lot of terms that weren't specifically musical to describe what he wanted, and it was hard for me to translate that into music."
Davis wanted things faster, or less "strident" (a word the singer found particularly puzzling), or said there should be more brass and strings, or that those instruments should come into the song much earlier than Connick's experience and gut instinct were telling him. At one point, he was obliged to hire a band in New York to beef up a track that had already been recorded to his satisfaction by an entirely different band in Los Angeles. He had to rework each song a half-dozen times.
"Clive would say, 'People are going to know these songs - they don't want to hear some weird interpretation.'" Connick has a reputation for writing intricate arrangements, and Davis refused to indulge that tendency on this disc.
"Eighty per cent of the time working with Clive was really cool, but 20 per cent of the time it was exceedingly difficult and frustrating," Connick said. "I would go in there with another arrangement and say, 'I know this is it,' and he'd say, 'No, that's not it.' I thought, 'What am I doing, auditioning for this dude?'
"There was one particular night when I was pissed, man, I felt humiliated by the whole thing. And my wife said, 'He called you and asked you if you wanted to work with him, and you said yes. You signed up for this. Nobody's forcing you to do it.'"
Some of the songs are tunes Connick never thought he'd sing, including numbers written or first recorded by Elton John ( Your Song ), Billy Joel ( Just the Way You Are ) and the Carpenters ( Close to You ). The album abounds with other people's signature songs, such as Mona Lisa (a hit for Nat King Cole), All the Way (Sinatra) and Can't Help Falling in Love (Elvis Presley). Some of the performances are beautifully simple divergences from the versions we're used to. A few come close to the legal definition of easy listening, as Connick admits.
"But it's still me," he said. "I did all the writing and orchestrating and arranging. It's not like I handed it over to somebody else and walked in one weekend and sang for a few hours."
He's sure he'll make another funk record, and do more jazz records with Branford and Wynton Marsalis, both of whom appear on Your Songs . He'll make more movies (his most recent, a 2009 romantic comedy with Renée Zellweger called New in Town , was shot mainly in Winnipeg) and probably do a Broadway show with George C. Wolfe (creator of Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk ), about the diversity of music and society in 1930s New York.
But if Your Songs blows up big, Connick will be ready to go big along with it. He's well aware of what some people (especially his jazz and funk fans) may say: that he's gone soft, shut down his own creativity, sold out.
"I'm ready for that, because I've already exhausted myself emotionally with that whole ethical issue," he said. "The bottom line is, I really like this record, and I really had fun making it. It's awesome to sing these songs this way. I've got some space, I can ride this wave, I'm not competing with four different string parts. Sometimes I write charts and don't leave myself room to really sing."
As for Davis, Connick thinks the hardest days in their relationship are over. He put his faith in the old hit-maker, that faith was shaken along the way, but now he has accepted the concept and purpose of the record, and the sometimes painful manner of its birth.
"I really do like Clive, I think I love him in a way," he said. "I developed a great relationship with him, and I have a great deal of respect for him. And if this works, I may do the whole thing again."