Grammy winners reflect on what makes a song a hit
NASHVILLE What makes a song THE song of the eyes of The Recording Academy? In the history of the 59 record of the year winners at the Grammy Awards, sometimes those songs captured the mood or sentiment of a universal emotion, or showcased a singer’s supreme talent. Sometimes the Grammy-winning song benefited from being featured in a hit film, or became a cultural touchstone for a year. And often these songs are just insatiably catchy and fun.
Many of these records of the year become pop music standards, still widely beloved and influential today, from Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Still other songs quickly lose their popularity as trends change or the artists who made them popular grow tired of repeating them.
Just ask Art Garfunkel why “Mrs. Robinson,” the hit song that was the first of two record of the year wins for Simon & Garfunkel, is still a great song today.
“It really swung,” Garfunkel said of the tune, which won in 1969. “It was infectious. It made you get up out of your seat and get on the dance floor. You can’t ignore that the rhythm cooked. That’s why it was a hit. Paul Simon plays great acoustic Martin guitar.”
The song wasn’t fully complete when it appeared in the hit film “The Graduate,” so the film version just has the two singers vocalizing a missing verse with “do-do-do-do-do.” And it’s widely considered the first rock ‘n’ roll song to be named record of the year.
“I give the credit to Mike Nichols,” Garfunkel said of the film’s director, who had the folk rockers help him with the soundtrack. “It was Mike as a film director who was open to rock ‘n’ roll and started looking at what we rockers were doing in our world and how it might sync into the film world.”
For singer Roberta Flack, she benefited from the right timing. Flack, one of only two artists who have won the category two years in a row, had released her song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” years before it won in 1973.
“Clint Eastwood called, wanting to have it as a part of his film, ‘Play Misty for Me,’” said Flack in an email interview. “The record label wanted to have it rerecorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was. With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”
Flack won again the next year for the song “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” which also became a hit when it was re-imagined as a hip-hop song by the Fugees in 1996.
Country vocal trio Lady Antebellum were just as surprised as anyone else when their name was called on that Grammy stage for record of the year for their hit “Need You Now” in 2011. Going up against artists like Jay-Z and Eminem, they figured they were the underdogs.
“We were shocked,” said singer Charles Kelley. “I think we were just the little engine that could and it sounded like nothing else that had come out that year.”
“We still felt new. We felt like the Nashville band that was out of place at the big party,” said singer Dave Haywood.
But the popularity of a song after winning a Grammy can sometimes become a burden. Bobby McFerrin’s hit a capella song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” introduced the acclaimed jazz vocalist to a much wider audience and even George H.W. Bush started using it as a presidential campaign theme. But it also suffered a backlash, and McFerrin told The Associated Press in 2013 that he hasn’t played the song in its entirety since 1988. It won in 1989.
Eric Clapton wrote his Grammy-winning song “Tears in Heaven” after the death of his 4-year-old son in 1991, but the guitar legend told the AP in 2004 that he had decided to stop playing the song.
The 60th annual Grammy Awards will be held Sunday in New York City and aired on CBS.