Barry Manilow believes today’s pop music has forgotten how to write a proper song.
Now 81, the music legend says the craft of songwriting has changed so much that he barely recognises the form he was trained in when he first launched his career in the 1970s.
“Young people don’t write the way I was trained to write,” Manilow told Billboard. “There’s no verse which goes into the chorus which goes back to the verse which goes to the ending, and you change keys. They don’t do that.
They start the song and then they just … it feels like a run-on sentence to me. I can’t find the hook. I can’t find the chorus. It just keeps on going, and then it ends.”
Manilow released his self-titled debut album in 1973. Since then, he’s sold more than 85 million records worldwide. But while many of his peers have retired, he’s still going strong.
“It’s like, ‘What? Am I the only one left?’” he said. “It’s Billy Joel, and Elton is not well, and Rod and Neil. Diana Ross is still in great shape, I think.
There must be only a handful of people in my world that are still there.
I’m still healthy. I’m strong and I’ve still got my voice and my energy. The night I can’t hit the F natural on ‘Even Now,’ that’s the night I throw in the towel. But I can still do it.”
Manilow also revealed he’s been working on a new album, though he admitted the process hasn’t been easy.
“This’ll probably be my last album,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for a long time … for so long that the style of music has changed.”
In fact, he had to overhaul the entire sound to fit more modern tastes.
“I had to go back and redo [the songs] so they sounded a little more contemporary. I had to take all the strings out, all the background vocals out, ‘cause they don’t do that anymore.
They don’t use strings and background vocals and all that. Even I heard that it sounded dated, so we had to go back and redo it.”
