Download Barry Manilow MP3s
Barry Manilow is an internationally renowned superstar whose career spans recording and songwriting, television, film and stage. Based on industry charts, he is the undisputed Number One Adult Contemporary Artist of all time, and his record sales exceed 50 million worldwide. He has written hundreds of songs and performed around the world, thrilling millions of fans, picking up a Grammy, an Emmy, Tony Awards, and an Oscar nomination along the way.
Barry's roots are in Brooklyn, New York, where music was always a part of his life. By the age of seven, he was a budding musician, taking accordion lessons and playing on a neighbor's piano. When he decided to make music his career, he went to the New York College of Music and Julliard while working in the mailroom at CBS to pay his expenses.
At CBS, 18-year-old Barry met a director who asked him to arrange some public domain songs for a musical adaptation of the melodrama The Drunkard. Instead, he wrote an entire original score. The musical became such a success that it ran for eight years.
Then, in 1972, Barry met Bette Midler and became her music director, arranger and pianist. He co-produced and created arrangements for her first Grammy Award-winning album, "The Divine Miss M," as well as her second platinum album, "Bette Midler." Barry had signed with Bell Records (which later became Arista Records) to make his solo album debut when Bette persuaded him to remain as her music director for her first national tour. Barry opened the second half of Bette's show with three original songs that literally stopped the show.
Barry Manilow began his own first solo tour in 1974 and the release of "Mandy" started an unprecedented string of 25 consecutive Top 40 hits, including "Even Now," "This One's for You," "Weekend in New England," "I Write the Songs" and "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again." Four years later, five of Barry's albums were on the charts at the same time, a record equaled only by Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis.
On March 2, 1977, ABC-TV presented Barry's first network special, "The Barry Manilow Special," to an audience of 37 million. The show won the Emmy Award for "Best Special of the Year" and was followed a year later by his Home Box Office special, taped live in concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, which was the first pay-TV show to seriously challenge network primetime specials in the ratings.
ABC followed the first special with "The Second Barry Manilow Special" in 1978, "The Third Barry Manilow Special" in 1979, and "One Voice" a year later.
In 1981, the Showtime cable TV network presented "The Barry Manilow Special," taped live at a sold-out concert at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena.
In 1983, "The Concert at Blenheim Palace" was taped live before 50,000 enthusiastic fans in England.
Barry's In the Round World Tour of 1981-1982 set box office and building attendance records. He broke records set by the Rolling Stones and captivated British audiences when his U.K. tour kicked off with five sold-out performances at the Royal Albert Hall, for which nearly one-half million people vied for the 21,500 available seats.
When Barry arrived in London, he was met by fans who had braved one of the worst storms in English history to catch a glimpse of the superstar. Three hundred policemen were on hand at Heathrow Airport to control what the British Daily Mail described as "a fervor scarcely matched since the heyday of Elvis Presley and The Beatles." The next day, the papers all carried the same headline... "Manilow Mania."
While performing at the Royal Albert Hall, Barry recorded a live album, "Barry Manilow -- Live in Britain," and he became the first American performer to see his LP debut at number one in its first week of release. A few months later, he was awarded three consecutive platinum albums in Britain, surpassing a record set by The Beatles.
Barry's 1982-1983 Around The World In 80 Dates tour included his first concert appearances in Japan and Australia. In a dramatic departure in 1984, Barry fulfilled a lifelong dream of recording an original collection of "saloon tunes" with a classic all-star jazz ensemble, including Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme, Gerry Mulligan and Shelly Mann. The "2:00 A.M. Paradise Cafe" album was universally heralded as his most important body of work.
In 1985, Barry released "Manilow" for RCA Records, his first new studio album in three years, and made his acting debut in the CBS telefilm Copacabana, a forties era musical comedy based on his Grammy Award-winning song. Copacabana was one of TV Guide's "Top Ten Made-For-TV Movies" of the year.
Barry returned to Arista Records in 1987 with the release of "Swing Street," an album he describes as "the kind of contemporary music the great artists who have been influenced by music would be making if they had the advantage of modern electronics." The album features a variety of legendary artists including Diane Schuur, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Phyllis Hyman, Jerry Hey, Tom Scott and Gerry Mulligan and contains an eclectic mix of pop and swing with jazz overtones.
Inspired by the music of "Swing Street" and "2:00 A.M. Paradise Cafe," the "Barry Manilow: Big Fun On Swing Street" CBS-TV special co-starred many of the artists featured on the two albums. Barry described the show as "a little bit of the forties and a little bit of the eighties... a fantasy trip down a timeless jazz street that could exist anytime, anyplace."
The same year, Barry added "author" to his already impressive list of talents and achievements. "Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise" recalls highlights of his early years as a struggling musician and captures his musical adventure from his appearances at the Continental Baths through the creation of his landmark "2:00 A.M. Paradise Cafe'" album. "As painful as they've sometimes been, I wouldn't trade away one minute of the adventures I've been through," he wrote. The book went into a second printing and kept fans lined up across the country for Barry's ten-city book signing tour.
Barry has consistently been one of the most successful touring artists in the music industry. His return to Broadway in 1989 for "Barry Manilow at the Gershwin" was praised by critics and played to standing-room-only houses for eight weeks. The show produced the "Barry Manilow: Live on Broadway" album and a home video of the same name, which stayed eight weeks at the number one spot on Billboard Magazine's music and videocassette charts.
Between tours, Barry produced Nancy Wilson's album "With My Lover Beside Me," which includes previously unrecorded lyrics by the late Johnny Mercer and music by Barry Manilow. Barry had previously put music to Johnny Mercer's lyrics for his 1984 recording "When October Goes" on the Paradise Cafe' album.
1990 marked the release of Barry's first holiday album, "Because It's Christmas." The album was certified Gold within two weeks of its release and was followed a year later with the companion home video.
"Showstoppers," a collection of some of the most memorable musical moments in Broadway history, was Barry's 23rd album. The songs span nearly 90 years of music � from "Give My Regards to Broadway" from the 1904 production Little Johnny Jones to the Tony Award-winning hit The Will Rogers' Follies.
Barry returned to the studio in 1994 to record his 28th album, a salute to the "big bands," released by Arista Records. "Singin' with the Big Bands," named for a song written for the album by Barry and Bruce Sussman, chronicles some of the best known songs of the Big Band era, performed by the actual bands that made them famous, including the orchestras of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, and Les Brown & His Band of Renown. It was quick to go Gold.
Barry's career in the theater ranges from his Tony Award-winning Broadway debut in 1977 to an SRO eight-week run on "The Great White Way" in 1989. "Barry Manilow's Copacabana � The Musical" premiered in the U.K. in March of 1994, touring England's provinces for four months before opening at London's Prince of Wales Theatre on June 23, 1994. Inspired by his hit single, "Copacabana," the elaborate two-act musical spectacular ran to packed houses on London's West End for 18 months.
The 1995 leg of the Greatest Hits Tour began with a string of dates in the U.S. and a tour of Mexico, which included three standing-room-only performances at Mexico City's National Auditorium. Marking Barry's first trip to Mexico, 12 newspapers proclaimed that "Mexico Loves Manilow!"
Following on the heels of his incredibly successful entry into the Mexican market, Barry returned to the U.S. where he was invited to be the inaugural performer at Chicago's new Rosemont Theatre, a grand scale luxury venue. After Rosemont, Barry continued with a string of sold-out dates in the Eastern United States before wrapping up 1995 with a week-long engagement at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. There was a new series of concerts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong in 1996.
1996 also saw Barry's return to the time of his initial success with the release of his 29th album, "Summer of '78." Featuring Barry's remarkable take on the classic songs that shared the charts with his own mega-hits, the collection includes some of the decade's best-known love songs.
Manilow's 30th album, "Manilow Sings Sinatra," a tribute to the great songs that Frank Sinatra made famous, was released in the fall of 1998 and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
The highlight of 1999 was the Gay Men's Health Center Benefit for AIDS care at Carnegie Hall. Barry recruited 30 studio musicians to add to his core band, and they played Barry's greatest hits with an amazing live sound. The evening culminated with a standing ovation as the New York Gay Men's Chorus joined Barry for the surprise finale song, "Stars in the Night," the emotional closing song from "Harmony."
In 2000, the world was once again astounded by the musical magnitude of Barry Manilow in his tour Manilow Live! The tour featured Manilow and a 30-piece orchestra performing songs from his amazing catalog of music.
Manilow Magic filled venue halls across the U.S. and the U.K. with Barry's famous songs, creating quite a buzz. In its mid-year report for 2000, Pollstar Magazine (the official record book for the concert industry) listed Barry as #33 on its list of Top 50 Tours. On the international front, Barry's concerts held four of the Top Ten concert box-office grosses.
During February of 2000, Barry ventured to Nashville, Tennessee for the taping of two Manilow television specials. The first, "Manilow Country," featured the talent of country stars Trisha Yearwood, Neal McCoy, Deana Carter, Jo Dee Messina, Lorrie Morgan, Kevin Sharp, Lila McCann, Gillian Welch and Jaci Velasquez singing their favorite Manilow hits... many with a unique "country" twist. The special was TNN's first high definition broadcast and became one of TNN's highest rated concert specials.
