Will Jennings was not a family title with most people, however he was on the must-call record of most of the world’s most profitable recording artists. He wrote the lyrics for a few of the finest identified songs in pop music historical past.
If nothing else Jennings, who has died aged 80 after a protracted sickness, would have achieved immortality for his contribution to Celine Dion’s magnum opus, My Coronary heart Will Go On. Co-written with James Horner, the music grew to become the standard-bearer for James Cameron’s monstrously profitable movie Titanic (1997), and topped the charts in additional than 25 international locations.
Horner’s music gave Dion the platform for a efficiency of operatic grandeur, whereas Jennings’s lyrics expressed the movie’s theme of a love affair transcending boundaries of house and time. Mikael Wooden, the Los Angeles Instances critic, described how the music “condensed that film’s epic melodrama into 5 endlessly re-playable minutes of sweeping faux-Celtic majesty”.
Jennings defined how he wrote it: “I had met this very vibrant girl who was about 101 years outdated once I met her … and I realised she may have been on the Titanic. So I wrote every thing from the standpoint of an individual of an important age trying again so a few years. And it was the love story that made the movie, in fact.”
The music received Jennings his second Academy Award for finest authentic music, in addition to a Golden Globe and a Grammy award. He’d received his first Academy Award (and a Golden Globe) 15 years earlier for Up The place We Belong, the lump-in-the-throat theme from Taylor Hackford’s movie An Officer and a Gentleman sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, and one other worldwide chart-topper.
Each it and My Coronary heart Will Go On had been anointed by the Recording Trade Affiliation of America as Songs of the Century. In 1980, Jennings had obtained his first Oscar nomination for Folks Alone (co-written with Lalo Schifrin), from the movie The Competitors, a couple of pair of rival pianists who fall in love.
Additionally in 1980 he started an expert relationship with Steve Winwood by co-writing a lot of the songs on Winwood’s second solo album, Arc of a Diver. This produced a high 10 hit within the US with Whereas You See a Probability, and was the prelude to a string of main successes.
The album Again within the Excessive Life generated hit singles with Again within the Excessive Life Once more, Freedom Overspill and the US No 1 Greater Love. The follow-up, Roll With It (1988), was a US No 1 album and spun off US chart-topping singles with the title observe, Don’t You Know What the Evening Can Do? and Holding On.
One other milestone was his collaboration with Eric Clapton on Tears in Heaven, from the soundtrack of the movie Rush (1991). The music was written within the aftermath of the unintended loss of life of Clapton’s four-year-old son Conor reached the Prime 5 within the UK and US, and received three Grammy awards together with Music of the Yr.
Jennings was born in Kilgore, Texas, the youngest of three youngsters of Hershel Jennings, a labourer, and his spouse Millie (nee Hughes). He graduated from Tyler Junior Faculty (TJC), then attended the College of Texas in Austin. He transferred to Stephen F Austin State College, and after finishing each bachelor’s and grasp’s levels within the Sixties he returned to show at TJC and later on the College of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
He met Carole Thurman whereas at TJC they usually married in 1965. In 2019, the school offered Jennings with its Legends of TJC award, and introduced the naming of the Carole and Will Jennings Foyer within the school’s Rogers Palmer Performing Arts Middle.
Jennings’s journey from academia to the commanding heights of the music enterprise was significantly assisted by Barry Manilow, who scored a US chart-topper with Seems Like We Made It (1977), with lryics by Jennings. A stately ballad composed by Richard Kerr, adorned with strings and massed vocal harmonies, it was an indicator of Jennings’s reward for writing lyrics that trod a positive line between being tearfully heart-rending and perilously schlocky.
He was intrigued by the best way listeners misinterpreted the music, assuming it was about one joyful couple when the truth is it was the story of two individuals who had “made it” by splitting up and discovering different companions.
“It’s a moderately unhappy and ironic lyric about making it aside and never collectively, and naturally everybody thinks it’s a full on, constructive assertion,” he mirrored. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s … in a approach.”
Kerr and Jennings had additionally mixed to put in writing Someplace within the Evening, which had been recorded by a number of artists together with Helen Reddy and Kim Carnes earlier than Manilow included it on his album Even Now (1978). It grew to become a US Prime 10 hit the next yr. In 1979 Dionne Warwick took the Jennings/Kerr composition I’ll By no means Love This Method Once more to No 5 on the US chart.
Different profession highlights included Whitney Houston’s chart-topping rendition of Didn’t We Virtually Have It All (1987), written by Jennings with Michael Masser, and he had a rustic music No 1 with Tim McGraw’s efficiency of Please Keep in mind Me (co-written with Rodney Crowell). He additionally struck up a profitable writing partnership with Joe Pattern of the Crusaders. They wrote all however one of many songs for BB King’s album Midnight Believer (1978), and repeated the feat for subsequent King albums Take It Residence (1979) and There Is At all times One Extra Time (1991). Additionally they wrote Road Life (which Randy Crawford and The Crusaders took to Quantity 5 in Britain) and Crawford’s solo effort One Day I’ll Fly Away (a UK Quantity 2 in 1980).
Jennings collaborated with Horner and Mariah Carey on The place Are You Christmas?, recorded by Religion Hill for the soundtrack of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), and it will grow to be a daily customer to the US Vacation 100 chart. Different beneficiaries of Jennings’s expertise over time included Roy Orbison, Diana Ross, Jimmy Buffett and former J Geils Band singer Peter Wolf.
Following Jennings’s loss of life, Wolf, who collaborated with Jennings on a number of of his solo albums, commented: “Will shared his skills with me, ever affected person and beneficiant; he was a treasured good friend and trainer, enriching my life in so some ways. It was an infinite honour to have labored with such a musical genius.” In 2006 Jennings was inducted into the Songwriters Corridor of Fame.
He’s survived by Carole and his sisters, Joyce and Gloria.
