Pop Music’s Visionary Matchmaker

In the mid-2000s, Lucinda Williams arrived at an L.A. studio to work with Hal Willner on one of the veteran music producer’s eccentric projects — in this case, a collection of pirate songs and sea chanteys. To her surprise, in walked another contributor, Sting. “Hal had this black book of contact information for everyone — musicians, actors, comedians,” Williams says. “All he had to do was call somebody, and they’d say, ‘No problem.’ People loved Hal — they were drawn to him. It was about the joy he found in what he did.”

Willner — who died on April 7th at age 64 of symptoms consistent with the coronavirus — was a champion of the odd, experimental, and obscure. After working his way into the music business in the Seventies, he produced albums by Marianne Faithfull and his close friend Lou Reed. (Metallica, who worked with Willner and Reed on the 2011 album Lulu, call him “a truly inspirational collaborator.”) In 1980, Willner was hired to select the background music for sketches on Saturday Night Live, a job he held for decades. He will probably be best remembered for a series of lovably offbeat tribute albums that showcased his mix-and-match creativity: The 1988 Disney-themed LP Stay Awake included Tom Waits, Aaron Neville, Bonnie Raitt, the Replacements, and Sun Ra; a 1992 collection honoring Charles Mingus featured Keith Richards, Chuck D, and Dr. John. At the time of his death, Willner was wrapping up a set of Marc Bolan and T. Rex covers by Williams, Joan Jett, Nick Cave, Kesha, and others. “I always looked forward to hearing the latest flight of his unbounded imagination,” says Sting, who worked on several Willner projects, “to marvel at his courage, his eclectic bravado, and his ability not to care about what is or isn’t ‘hip.’ And of course, that’s the essence of ‘hip.’ ”