Covered: Will Jennings, Volume 2: 1988-1999

Here's "Volume 2" celebrating the songwriting of Will Jennings.

With "Volume 1," I showed that Jennings co-wrote many popular hits in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. His winning streak continued through all of the 1990s in this volume.

Jennings co-wrote five Number One hits in the U.S. in Volume 1. He only co-wrote two in this volume: "Roll with It" and "My Heart Will Go On." But it was a fluke "Tears in Heaven" only reached Number Two (held back by "Save the Best for Last" by Vanessa Williams), since it was one of the top five best selling singles of the year. Rolling Stone Magazine also put it on their list of the top 500 songs of all time.

I found an article that talked a bit about Jennings' involvement with "Tears in Heaven." Eric Clapton wrote the music and lyrics for the first verse, with lyrics about the tragic and untimely death of his young son. However, he got stuck at that point. He'd been impressed with Jennings being involved co-writing many hits for Steve Winwood, so Clapton recruited him to help. Jennings not only wrote the lyrics of the other verses, he wrote both the music and lyrics of the bridge. So that's a good example showing that while he was best known for his lyric writing, he was capable with music composition too.

The biggest hit here, though, has to be "My Heart Will Go On," the theme song for the blockbuster "Titanic" movie. It was a Number One song in the U.S., Britain, and over twenty more countries. It was the best selling single of 1998, and is currently listed as the tenth best selling single of all time, as I write this in 2025! It basically won all the awards, including Academy Award for Best Original Song, Grammy Award for Song of the Year, Grammy Award for Record of the Year, and Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. 

The music to the song was written by James Horner. He didn't write many other big hits, but he did the scores to well over 100 movies. Originally, director James Cameron just wanted the theme song to be an instrumental. But Horner felt it needed lyrics, so he secretly got Jennings to write the lyrics, since he'd worked with Jennings on a few songs previously. After Cameron heard it, he wasn't keen on having vocals. But he was under intense pressure from the movie studio to make a profit since "Titanic" was the most expensive movie ever made up until that point. So Cameron ultimately gave the okay, and was glad he did, since the song helped make the movie the top grossing film of all time up until then.

After that though, Jennings didn't have many more hits. No doubt, at that point, he could have retired and slept on a hill of money from his "My Heart Will Go On" profits alone. He did have some more music projects into the early 2000s, but seems to have retired by about 2005. He died in 2024 at the age of 80.

As with "Volume 1," all the songs here are the original versions, which were usually hits. I could have included many more lesser hits, but I generally wanted to limit these volumes to the bigger hits, which usually were the best songs. 

This album is 57 minutes long. 

01 Roll with It (Steve Winwood)
02 If We Hold On Together (Diana Ross)
03 Don't You Know What the Night Can Do (Steve Winwood)
04 Many a Long and Lonesome Highway (Rodney Crowell)
05 Holding On (Steve Winwood)
06 The Blues Come Over Me (B.B. King)
07 Tears in Heaven (Eric Clapton)
08 What Kind of Love (Rodney Crowell)
09 Help Me Up (Eric Clapton)
10 My Heart Will Go On [Love Theme from Titanic] (Celine Dion)
11 I Want to Spend My Lifetime Loving You (Tina Arena & Marc Anthony)
12 Please Remember Me (Tim McGraw)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3Pu5JVo1 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/XOU3PDIFFAyEJhE/file

The cover photo is from 1999. In full picture, Jennings is holding a Grammy Award in his hands.

Covered: Will Jennings, Volume 1: 1975-1987

Here's more music for my "Covered" series highlighting excellent songwriters. I'm trying to get to the older stuff before moving to newer stuff, so this one was not the one I planned to post next. But I recently stumbled across the fact that Will Jennings died in September 2024, and it's now June 2025, so this is a belated post to mark his passing. I found enough music for two volumes; this is the first one.

Will Jennings was born and raised in Texas. After getting bachelor's and master's degrees, starting in the late 1960s, he worked for a few years as a professor of English. Then in 1971, he got the songwriting bug. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee and tried to become a professional songwriter. It took a few years before he had much success, but by the end of the 1970s, he was in high demand. His songwriting strength was his lyric writing, though he could write music as well. No doubt, his experience as an English professor helped with that.

Jennings almost always co-wrote songs. He developed good relationships with some musicians, leading to many years of collaborations. A key example is Steve Winwood. While Winwood found success with the band Traffic in the late 1960s and 1970s, he co-wrote the vast majority of his songs then with band member Jim Capaldi, with Winwood generally writing the music and Capaldi the lyrics. So when Winwood started his solo career in the late 1970s, he needed a new songwriting partner. He didn't write that many songs with Jennings, but a big percentage of them turned out to be hits. There are more of them in Volume 2. He also collaborated a lot with B.B. King and Rodney Crowell, amongst others. 

Here's his Wikipedia entry:

Will Jennings - Wikipedia 

I'm pretty sure all of the songs here are the original versions, with the vast majority of them being hits. In this time period, he co-wrote five songs which were Number One hits in the U.S.: "Looks like We Made It," "Up Where We Belong," "Higher Love," "Back in the High Life Again," and "Didn't We Almost Have It All."

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Somewhere in the Night (Helen Reddy)
02 Feelins' (Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn)
03 Looks like We Made It (Barry Manilow)
04 Street Life (Crusaders with Randy Crawford)
05 I'll Never Love This Way Again (Dionne Warwick)
06 Better Not Look Down (B.B. King)
07 While You See a Chance (Steve Winwood)
08 One Day I'll Fly Away (Randy Crawford)
09 Valerie (Steve Winwood)
10 Never Make a Move Too Soon (Crusaders & B.B. King)
11 Up Where We Belong (Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes)
12 Higher Love (Steve Winwood)
13 Finer Things (Steve Winwood)
14 Didn't We Almost Have It All (Whitney Houston)
15 Back in the High Life Again (Steve Winwood) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CNYC7Jdh

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/prlFwIDwbU4DlcW/file

I don't know when the cover photo is from exactly, but he looks younger than the one I chose for the second volume. In the full photo, he's holding an Academy Award in his hands. He won two Academy Awards in his career, one for "Up Where We Belong" in 1982 and the other for "My Heart Will Go On" in 1997, so this is very likely to be from 1982.