Obituary
A name I admit that I was not familiar with, but the songs are almost part of our DNA. On Broadway, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place and lots more. Writing with her husband Barry Mann they were contemporaries of Carole King and Gerry Goffin.
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2023/0603/1387269-legendary-us-songwriter-cynthia-weil-has-died-aged-82/
Mann/Weil had a huge and varied catalogue. If you did a playlist of Mann/Weil, Goffin/King and Barry/Greenwich you’d have a fab slice of 1960s New York pop. RIP
Add Lieber/Stoller to those three songwriting pairs and you’ve got enough hit recordings to see out your days, probably.
and throw in a bit of Bacharach/David and Sedaka/Greenfield for a few more days of Brill Building excellence.
Carole King on Brill Building “ Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours.”
…and I learned this week that it’s pronounced as ‘While’ when I always assumed it was as ‘vial’
Me too – every day is a school day
When talking about Brill everyone forgets about Chip Taylor. Wild Thing and Angel of the morning ain’t too shabby either
Shape Of Things To Come was one of theirs – many versions available (Paul Revere and the Raiders, Ramones, Rich Kids, Gary Moore)
And, on their debut album (once they’d lost the “Ambrose” bit) – Slade:
The excellent jukebox musical about Carole King, Beautiful, features Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann as friend and rivals of Goffin/King – and chucks in a few of their masterful songs as well.