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‘Don’t Give Me Somebody Else’s Song’: How ‘Mandy’ Made Barry Manilow a Star
“Don’t Give Me Somebody Else’s Song”: How “Mandy” Made Barry Manilow a Star On January 18, 1975, a song that its singer had not wanted to record, that had not originally been called by its title, and that had begun life as an uptempo British pop record, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.…
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Barry Manilow: The Heart He Saved for Last
For half a century, Barry Manilow has sung other people’s feelings back to them — the loneliness, the longing, the hope that love might still show up. But behind the sequined jackets and the soaring ballads, there was always a quieter story unfolding: a man who gave music to children he’d never meet, who loved…
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How Barry Manilow Turned a Songwriter’s Demo into “Weekend in New England”
Every singer has one song that stops being a song and starts being a memory. For Barry Manilow, it is the slow tide of strings, the lonely piano, and that impossible, aching melody: “Weekend in New England.” Play the opening bars for anyone who came of age in the late seventies and watch their face…
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The Untold Story of Barry Manilow: The Jingle King Who Conquered the World
Long before the sequined jackets and the sold-out arenas, before the Las Vegas marquees and the millions of devoted “Fanilows,” Barry Manilow was a starving kid from Brooklyn with a piano, a stack of other people’s lyrics, and fifteen seconds to make America remember a melody forever. The story of how he got from a…