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Steve Tyrell is hundreds of miles away, speaking by phone from the West Coast. Yet it takes just two words delivered in that low-pitched, slowed-down, slightly raspy drawl to make the kind of intimate connection this soulful singer of pop standards is famous for, whether he’s charming a big concert crowd or a clutch of his upper-crust fans at New York’s Café Carlyle.
“Hello, darlin’,” he croons to his audience of one in this case, and the interview, prompted by Mr. Tyrell’s upcoming engagement at the Performing Arts Center in Westhampton Beach, is off to a most friendly start. The PAC show on October 31 is the one stop Mr. Tyrell will be making on his way to the fabled Café Carlyle for an annual holiday-season gig.
“After Bobby Short died, they offered me that spot,” he explains, adding that he was “very honored,” not only by the prestige of the venue and its swish clientele, but because he and fans “who come from all over the world to see me,” share a love of New York in holiday mode.
It has been a long and interesting journey that has brought Mr. Tyrell from his beginnings as a 15-year-old singer recording local R&B hits in Texas to status as a regular at Gotham’s classy café, with a fifth album, “Back to Bacharach”—a collection of songs from the piano of Burt Bacharach and the pen of Hal David—selling briskly.
At 19, as a singer with “a couple of hits” to his credit, Mr. Tyrell left Houston for New York City to work at the pop and soul music giant, Scepter Records, more or less shelving his singing career to make his mark in the music business as an innovative record producer/promoter.
“As a promotion man, I got to go all over the country,” he says. “It was very exciting.”
That was also when he got to know Bacharach and David, the songwriting team that has been central to his personal life as well as his career.
“I didn’t sing for 20 years,” says Mr. Tyrell. Always “fascinated with the producing and writing of songs,” he devoted himself to producing the work of other artists, including Bacharach and David, “who were getting all those jobs writing for the movies.” Still very young, he became one of the first music supervisors responsible for coordinating hit songs with the release of the films they appeared in.
It wasn’t that singing was new to the movies, he acknowledges.
“In the old days there were a lot of songs in movies, but the soundtrack awareness was not there,” says Mr. Tyrell, who notes that he saw early on “how you could fuse songs into movies and have hit records from that.”
It was Mr. Tyrell who was largely responsible for making “Alfie” almost as famous for its theme as for the movie itself, for making the theme from “Valley of the Dolls” a number-one song and, perhaps most famously, for calling in his Texas friend B.J. Thomas to record “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“When I moved to California I had worked on a lot of films,” he says, “and I continued.” For Steven Spielberg, Mr. Tyrell had the clever idea of turning the tune sung by the mice in the animated film “American Tail”—“Somewhere Out There”—into a hit song for humans.
It won two Grammys and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Then, in 1991, his career took another 180-degree turn. Though he was perfectly content working his behind-the-scenes magic, Mr. Tyrell started singing again after taking the mike as a stand-in for the wedding singer in Steve Martin’s film “Father of the Bride,” a role that had not yet been cast.
His rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight” created such an enthusiastic stir that it not only got Mr. Tyrell the role, it led to his “rediscovery” as a singer and to his recording an album of standards in 1999.
Apparently no one was more surprised than Mr. Tyrell himself. “I didn’t think that would happen,” he says, “that I would be back to being an artist.”
Mr. Tyrell didn’t give up his alternate career, however. He continued to produce albums by others though these days he says he makes “mainly my own albums.”
His latest, “Back to Bacharach,” was a labor of love which he undertook in 2002 but did not complete for several years. The work was sadly interrupted when his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
After her death in 2003, it took several more years, but in 2006 Mr. Tyrell resumed work on the album, which was completed in 2008. All royalties collected for “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” a song to which James Taylor, Rod Stewart, Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach and Martina McBride all contributed their talents, are to be donated to cancer research, according to Mr. Tyrell. Moreover, in support of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ campaign for a cure, the whole roster of stars plans to make an appearance on the team’s opening day next spring.
“We thought it would be a good theme song,” says Mr. Tyrell.
In the meantime, Mr. Tyrell will be charming his many fans singing what he considers some of the best songs ever written, songs that have been described as elegant and romantic, combining a naivety that has disappeared from popular culture with a sophistication that manifests itself in the songs’ chord structures as well as in the magical marriage of lyrics and melodies.
And he will no doubt do it looking as relaxed as he sounds now, bringing the interview to a close with a gallant, “Thanks darlin.’”
Tickets for the show, set for 8 p.m. on Friday, October 31, range from $70 to $100 and can be purchased by calling (631) 288-1500 or online at www.WHBPAC.org.
on Oct 20, 2008