Even Now by Barry Manilow is a Masterpiece
The song is about the desperation of being with the wrong person for the wrong reason while the right person is waiting for you out of reach.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, Barry Manilow, big hair, Vegas, schmaltzy and more middle of the road than a highway’s length of painted white lines. I know - your mum loved Barry. Mine did.
Every Christmas the latest Manilow Magic vinyl would appear under the tree ‘To Mum, Love from Santa’. The TV specials, and live concerts were recorded and the VHS tapes played until they snapped. Barry always looked surprised, embarrassed even, by the attention and applause. His grey blue eyes half closed would peer out from under his beautiful thick brown, highlighted hair like a Brooklyn Princess Di.
He mocked the newspapers and their obsession with his nose. Our mothers cried, and sang along, who’d blame them? Mandy, originally titled Brandy, was the breakthrough and it set the tone for being melancholically unlucky in love. There was no anger, there was no sex, there was just this nice guy who we all took home to our mum.
Nowadays we know much more about the man. Back then in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s he hinted at girlfriends but was always too busy to settle down. As late as 2009 on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs Barry was talking about his ‘girlfriend Linda’. Even though he became famous for playing piano for Bette Midler in New York’s gay steam baths, Manilow still managed to be the perfect straight boy next door. And let’s be clear: none of his audience would have minded if he had been out but the record industry would not have let them hear his music in the first place if he had been open about his sexuality.
But aside from the forced closeting, if you dig a little way underneath the Manilow Magic there are surprising depths, dark recesses and some subtle hints at who the real Barry was.
On his first album, Barry Manilow, there is a song called Seven More Years that has Barry singing to his prison cellmate, David.
“David, I said as I lay on my bed.
Another year’s gone by.
Your startin’ your parole,
In the mornin’ they said.
Please tell her I’m alright”
The song talks about having Seven More Years in prison and how the singer will miss not only his wife but also his cell mate who is to be released the next day.
“Won’t you write me sometime, I’ll miss you, you know
But I’ll make out alright”
This is not ‘Bermuda Triangle’ or ‘I Write The Songs’ territory. In fact it verges on Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson material with its narrative, setting and characters. It also comes right after the 7 minute epic Could It Be Magic which was based on a piece by Chopin and competed with MacArthur Park, Music and Bohemian Rhapsody for the title of biggest long song hit of the ‘70s.
Right after Seven More Years is the glam rock Bolanesque Flashy Lady with the totally ‘un-Manilow’ line
“When all the people call you trash, I love to love the Flashy Lady”
Hey Barry! Manilow explained the multiple genres on the first album as an opportunity to show off his songwriting skills in the hope that other singers would pick up his songs.
On Manilow 2 in 1974, Barry hit pay dirt with international mega hit Mandy and the follow up It’s A Miracle which were both fairly standard lyrically. But tucked away on the same album was Early Morning Strangers - essentially about casual sex and co-written with Hal David. And check out Sandra about the desperate life of a woman who has found herself shoved into the role housewife:
“Depressed for a while when the youngest was born..She might take a drink with the housework…a Martini or two before dinner but she knows when to stop…”
Manilow may have been writing about his own mother who had challenges with alcohol or maybe it was a noirish Ladies Who Lunch for the bridge and tunnel crowd. Later in the song we get “She was doing the dishes, when a glass fell and broke on the tile, And she cut her wrist (quite by mistake) It was touch and go for a while”
By 1978 Barry Manilow was a big star who the critics loved to hate and audiences loved to adore. His album that year was Even Now which has been described as Manilow’s Pet Sounds. Unfortunately, it starts with Copacabana but skip that and you will find A Linda Song about a man who walks out on a woman but can’t get over her- “When times got rough he’d call her and once or twice she took the call. Then she changed her number…”
But it is the title track that is peak Dark Manilow. Even Now has the narrator climbing the stairs to his apartment knowing that he is going home to the wrong person. He hopes that she won’t notice that he is really in love with someone else. Barry sings to his true love that Even Now when things are going well he is thinking about them. (The gender of the person left behind is not revealed)
The song builds its emotional power from the thought of what might have been up to this line: “Even Now when I never hear your name and the world has changed so much since you’ve been gone” Now we are wondering did the love of Barry’s life die and nobody will talk about them around Barry anymore? Or was it that everyone else knows that Barry had to leave the love of his life and his friends and family don’t know how to talk about it? His one big love was swept under the carpet and never more discussed leaving Barry with the pain, the lack of resolution and even desperation.
Manilow is unapologetic in his yearning for the other person. By the time we get to the epic key change towards the end of the song all pretence is gone. He knows his life with this new person will be an unhappy and painful experience and he is right on the edge. He has tried to make his present situation work “ Even Now when I have come so far”
Unusually for Manilow the song takes his voice right to the top of his range which increases the drama for the line “And God I wish I knew” making this song as powerful, as emotionally wrenching and as wonderful as Sondheim’s Losing My Mind, or Being Alive. And when you think that Barry has wrung you dry there is a beautiful little modulation on the penultimate line allowing another glorious key change into the final “EVEN NOW”.
On one level Even Now can be read as a great character song - a character who has made a mistake and can’t let go of the ‘what might (or should) have been’. It could be something pulled out the songwriter’s imagination.
Or it could be read as more. In interviews Manilow has spoken about how his mother’s family were unhappy that she had married an Irish man rather than a Jew. And we know that love across cultures and racial backgrounds was problematic in the 1940s and ‘50s - and still can be today. Could Even Now be what Tony might have sung if he had not followed his heart to Maria and ended up with another woman?
The song could be understood as an anthem for all the gay men and women trapped in heterosexual marriages with no way out. Manilow himself had been briefly married to a woman in the ‘60s and knew of what he spoke.
There is a line in the song about having a ‘better life’ albeit with the wrong person which is a sentiment shared and feared by many people. This, for me, is the key emotional core of the song and is a message that is strangely modern with our belief in being true to ourselves as a route to success.
What Barry is saying with Even Now is that the ‘better life’ whatever it may be is illusory if it is not shared with the person that we really love because it is based on material rather than emotion. When he sings Even Now we believe that Barry Manilow has been through this same hard choice and is telling us that whether it is to hide one’s sexuality, because of economic necessity or down to cultural pressures, sharing your life with someone for any reason apart from love is never the right choice.
This is the universal message that makes Manilow Magic.
Check out EVEN NOW by Barry Manilow here:
EVEN NOW Apple Music
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