Various Artists - Covered: Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Volume 2: 1969-2002

Here's the second and last of my Covered series collection for legendary songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

If you look at this song list as well as the song list for Volume 1, I think the sheer diversity of songs is remarkable. A lot of songwriters or songwriting teams in this Covered series have a certain style or sound, so you often can tell if a song is written by them. Not so with Mann and Weil. There's no way I could have imagined these songs had anything in common, because they don't, except for who wrote them.

Mann and Weil have shown a remarkable ability to survive changing trends. They continued to write hits from the start of the 1960s all the way to end of the 1990s. That said, I'm not a big fan of some musical trends from the late 1970s onwards. That means there are a higher number of songs Mann and/or Weil wrote from that time onwards that I don't like, even some big hits. In particular, they had some cheesy "adult contemporary" hits I can't enjoy at all. For instance, "How Much Love" by Leo Sayer, "Just Once" by Quincy Jones and James Ingram, "I Will Come to You" by Hanson, "Love Will Conquer All" by Lionel Richie, "Through the Fire" by Chaka Khan, "Running with the Night" by Lionel Richie, and more. I can enjoy a totally cheesy song if it has something special about it, such as a great melody (for instance, "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill, which is included here), but more often, I find those sorts of songs quickly forgettable, and almost interchangeable.

I wasn't going to include "Somewhere Out There" by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, because I consider it also in this category of cheesy pap. But that song was such a massive hit, including winning the Grammy for song of the year, that I figured I couldn't really have a compilation of Mann and Weil without it. There are a couple other songs like that on this volume that I reluctantly included. Basically, I think a lot of popular music has gone astray in recent decades, and unfortunately Mann and Weil wanted to keep writing hits, so they followed those unfortunate trends. That said, I think most of the songs here are very good, showing why the two of them are considered one of the most famous songwriting teams of all time.

01 Make Your Own Kind of Music (Mama Cass Elliot)
02 Just a Little Lovin' (Dusty Springfield)
03 It's Getting Better (Mama Cass Elliot)
04 I Just Can't Help Believin' (Elvis Presley)
05 New World Coming (Mama Cass Elliot)
06 Rock and Roll Lullaby (B. J. Thomas)
07 You Baby (John Holt)
08 Here You Come Again (Dolly Parton)
09 Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill)
10 He's So Shy (Pointer Sisters)
11 Never Gonna Let You Go (Sergio Mendes)
12 Somewhere Out There (Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram)
13 Don't Know Much (Linda Ronstadt & Aaron Neville)
14 Wrong Again (Martina McBride)
15 None of Us Are Free (Solomon Burke)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16693943/COVRDMnnWeil_1969-2002_Volum2_atse.zip.html

Thank goodness that I was able to find a decent color photo of Mann and Weil this time around. There are lots of photos of them since about 2010 onwards, but I wanted a photo of them before they were senior citizens. This photo is undated, but I'm guessing by their looks in comparison to other photos of them I've seen that it was taken in the 1990s.

Various Artists - Covered: Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Volume 1: 1961-1968

I'm back with more of the Covered series. This time, I'm highlighting the work of the great songwriting team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Although their musical careers actually began at the end of the 1950s, they wrote hits for many decades, and both are still alive as I write this. They're responsible for many classic hits, including "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'" (co-written with Phil Spector), which has been played more on the radio than any song ever.

As I usually do with this series, I've included songs written by both of them, as well as those written or co-written by one of them or the other. In their case, their musical collaboration began early, along with their personal relationship. They got married in 1961, and have stayed together ever since. Both Mann and Weil have written hit songs without the other in about equal measure. But the vast majority of the songs here (and on the album to follow that covers the later part of their career) were written by the both of them.

I won't go into more detail about their careers and lives. If you want to know more, here are their Wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Mann

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Weil

Note that the songs "On Broadway" and "Only in America" are special cases, because they were co-written by Mann and Weil along with another famous songwriting team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. So I included the songs here and in my Covered albums for Leiber and Stoller, but I was careful to use different versions. (For Leiber and Stoller, I used the George Benson version of "On Broadway" and the Drifters version of "Only in America").

Also note that I've only included the songs that I like. There were a fair number of hits they did that I didn't include. But, by and large, big hits are big because they're really good songs, so I think I've included nearly all of the big hits they were involved in for this time period.

01 Who Put the Bomp [In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp] (Barry Mann)
02 I Love How You Love Me (Paris Sisters)
03 Uptown (Crystals)
04 Where Have You Been [All My Life] (Arthur Alexander)
05 He's Sure the Boy I Love (Crystals [Darlene Love])
06 On Broadway (Drifters)
07 Blame It on the Bossa Nova (Eydie Gorme)
08 Only in America (Jay & the Americans)
09 You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' (Righteous Brothers)
10 I'm Gonna Be Strong (Gene Pitney)
11 Saturday Night at the Movies (Drifters)
12 Walking in the Rain (Ronettes)
13 We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Animals)
14 Kicks (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
15 [You're My] Soul and Inspiration (Righteous Brothers)
16 Hungry (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
17 Love Is Only Sleeping (Monkees)
18 Shape of Things to Come (Max Frost & the Troopers)
19 Something Better (Marianne Faithfull)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180206/COVRDMnnWeil1961-1968Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CoqiZeAr

I get really annoyed how hard it is to find any color photos of some famous people when they were younger. I literally couldn't find a single good color photo of Mann and/or Weil until about the 1990s, and only a couple of bad ones. So I've had to resort to a black and white one, which I've colorized. This photo apparently was taken in 1969.

You can't tell because I've cropped it, but Weil was sitting up high on a desk while Mann was sitting lower. When I cropped it to focus on their faces, it seemed as if Weil was way taller than Mann, which she isn't. So I used Photoshop to raise Mann up in the photo until he was at Mann's level.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.