Songwriter shares real story behind Killing Me Softly
Songwriter wants people to hear her side of the Killing Me Softly story
Lori Lieberman didn’t want to go out. The singer, 20, was struggling with the affair she’d started with her 44-year-old married manager, Norman Gimbel.
But that night in 1971, a friend coaxed her into seeing Don Mclean at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. He had just released American Pie.
Lieberman found herself struck by another Mclean song, a heartbreaking ballad, Empty Chairs.
“As soon as he started singing, she pulled out a napkin and starting scribbling notes,” remembers the friend, Michele Willens.
Lieberman says she later shared her napkin poem with Gimbel. As he said multiple times during the 1970s, Gimbel already had a song title in his notebook that seemed to fit her feelings.
He took the lyrics to Charles Fox, his writing partner, and together they created a classic: Roberta Flack’s 1973 No. 1 hit, Killing Me Softly With His Song.
“Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words,” Gimbel told the Asbury Park Press in 1973.
Lieberman released her version in 1972. It wasn’t a hit, but Flack heard it and decided to cover it.
Lieberman did not get a songwriting credit or cut of the publishing royalties that flowed to Fox and Gimbel after Flack’s Grammy-winning version or the 1996 Fugees redo that hit No. 2.
That didn’t bother her. She was content with her place in pop history as the song’s inspiration. But last month, when Flack received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys, Lieberman worried that she’s being cut out of that story.
That’s because Gimbel, who died in 2018 at 91, spent his final years trying to discredit Lieberman. Now, Lieberman is getting support from Flack, who said she cried when she heard of the conflict last year.
“I hope Lori knows I am forever grateful for her part in the writing of the song,” Flack wrote.
Mclean has urged her to hire an attorney to fight for a credit.
“They were not nice,” says Mclean. “You have a sensitive, lovely lady who never told a lie in her life, who writes poetry with feelings.”
Lieberman, 68, isn’t interested in going to court. She doesn’t want an official credit. She just wants to be recognized.
“I have been called a liar,” says Lieberman. “And it feels terrible. It’s really for my own integrity and for the truth to come out.”
She was 19 when her pediatrician heard she wanted to be a musician and suggested she meet her neighbour, Gimbel, who had written the words to Andy Williams’ 1956 hit Canadian Sunset and the English lyrics to The Girl From Ipanema.
Fox, 79, said in his 2010 memoir, he and Gimbel wanted an arrangement such as Burt Bacharach and Hal David had with Dionne Warwick. They signed Lieberman to a five-year contract, during which she would pay them 20 per cent of her earnings. “We heard her and loved her sound,” Fox said last year. “She had a beautiful alto voice. Norman and I started writing for her.”
The affair with Gimbel started right away. In the early days, Gimbel didn’t want Lieberman to hide her connection to Killing Me Softly. The shy performer says she was even given a script to help her explain the song’s origin. She told it to Mike Douglas on national television, and Gimbel confirmed it in multiple interviews.
“That was the story,” says Sean Derek, who worked as an assistant to Gimbel and Fox in the 1970s, and has come out in support of Lieberman.
Lieberman says that story shifted in 1997. That’s when, in an interview, she said her former managers were “very, very controlling.” She hadn’t spoken to Gimbel in years. But she’d rekindled a friendship with Fox. They, too, would not speak after that interview.
The business relationship between Lieberman and her managers broke down in 1976.
Gimbel, she says, had become abusive, controlling and unfaithful. She broke up with him and asked to be let out of her contract.
Lieberman had opened for Randy Newman and sang with Leonard Cohen, but only the second of her four albums had charted — at No. 192. She began to record again in the 1990s. She heard from Gimbel for the first time in years after releasing a song called Cup of Girl in 2011. It’s a scathing take on Svengali culture, the offender’s tools including “dishonesty,” “promiscuity” and “her diary.”
“Take your money, take your credit,” sings Lieberman. “Take your secrets along with it.”
In April, Lieberman will perform a show billed as A Return to the Troubadour. Onstage, she’ll tell the story of hearing Mclean and how she helped write one of pop music’s most enduring classics.
“I’m not looking for credit and I’m not looking for money,” she says. “I just want the truth of how the song was written to come out.” The Washington Post