Trivia / Barry Manilow

• Ascended Fanon: "Sure, Let's Go with That" is Manilow's reaction to an interviewer who assumed that the song "Written In Stone" was about Linda Allen.
• Breakthrough Hit: "Mandy".
• Chart Displacement: He had three #1 hits on Billboard, but "Copacabana" wasn't one of them (it peaked at #8).
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Despite endless claims to the contrary by journalists, Manilow did not write the famous "You Deserve A Break Today" McDonald's commercial, but he did sing the vocal on it.
  • "I Write The Songs" is not Manilow going on an ego trip about what a fantastic songwriter he is. The "I" in the title actually refers to the spirit of Music, and in fact the very last line of the song is, "I am Music, and I write the songs". As Manilow himself is constantly at great pains to point out, he didn't even write that song; Bruce Johnston did.
• Creator's Oddball: People used to his easy-listening-type Soft Rock will be very surprised when they listen to "Bobbie Lee" and "Some Kind Of Friend", the former being straight-up Hard Rock, and the latter a New Wave song.
• He Also Did: A jazz album, two swing albums, and two Concept Albums.
  • In the early Seventies, he worked as a jingle writer for commercials, and wrote several famous ones such as the "Like a Good Neighbor" jingle for State Farm Insurance. As noted above, he also sang the vocal on the famous "You Deserve a Break Today" McDonald's commercial, but he didn't write one bit of it.
    • VSM (Very Strange Medley) with the commercials is here.
  • In The '80s, Copacabana was made into a musical Made-for-TV Movie starring Manilow as Tony Starr and Annette O'Toole as Lola Lamar. See it here.
  • He composed the score for the stage musical Harmony, about the German a capella group the Comedian Harmonists whose fast rise to international popularity in the 20s and 30s was cut short by the rise of Nazism (because some of its members were Jewish).
• Referenced by...:
  • On Night Court, Barry got repeatedly dissed by Judge Harry Stone as a cheesy hack, in favor of his beloved Mel Tormé. The discovery that they have, in fact, done a duet together, was enough to render him inconsolable.
  • Whenever Super Dave Osbourne tried to assemble a band for his show, the band would somehow always cancel at the last minute, and get replaced by a Trinidadian steel drum band... who only know how to play "Copacabana."
• What Could Have Been: At one point, the producers of the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer ran into Creative Differences with star Neil Diamond, and considered firing Diamond and hiring Manilow to replace him.