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Continued from page 51 you, because you’re looking for what is in you. You’re looking to do what pleases you, and as a result maybe something emerges. So I’ve heard people tell me for years that there’s a sound, that there’s a style. Great, but until Roberta Flack called me one day and said, “I heard your song and I want to sing it,” I never knew I was going to have a hit, to be honest. Do you remember that feeling the first time you heard it on the radio? Do you remember where you were? Well, I’ll tell you how that happened. Norman Gimbel and I had a long relationship and collaboration. A lot of the songs we’ve heard here today I did with Norman Gimbel—who also wrote songs like “Girl from Ipanema” and “Watch What Happens” with Michel Legrand. So we wrote that song, “Killing Me Softly,” for a young artist’s first album on Capitol named Lori Lieberman. We were looking for a voice. Norman and I were looking for a voice, like Bacharach and David had a voice with Dionne Warwick. We wanted someone like that, who we could write songs for. So we did a lot of listening and a lot of looking at the clubs, and we finally found this one young singer, Lori

Charles Fox performs his mega-hit “Killing Me Softly With His Song” at the end of his Keynote Interview.

our loves—or loves lost—and all those things. We all are moved by music, so “Killing Me Softly With a Song” sounded like a very interesting prospect. He went home, wrote the lyric, and called me in a couple of hours. I took it down over the phone, and the song just came right out of me, I don’t know, probably as fast as I could sing it. That’s how fast it came out. But it wasn’t until the record was released and programmed on American Airlines… Now, when we get on planes, we bring our own music with us—iPads, iPods, whatever. In 1972, ’73, if you went on a plane and you wanted to hear music, you listened to music they programmed. So one thing Capitol did very well for us was they programmed this album, and one day, as fate would have it, Roberta Flack had just finished a concert in California with Quincy Jones and was heading back to New York, and she was a prisoner of ours at 35,000 feet. And she told me that she was so moved by it, she took out a pencil and piece of paper and started writing the lyrics and notes down. So when she got to New York, she called Quincy Jones and asked how she could meet Charles Fox. She had just won the Grammy Award for the first time ever for Best Artist and Best Record, so it was pretty extraordinary for me to get the call from a woman who just called me out of the blue and said, “Hi, this is Roberta Flack. We haven’t met, but I’m gonna sing your songs.” It rated right up there in my history of good phone calls to get. [laughter] As you said that, I thought [to myself, that] there’s not a person in this room that wouldn’t want a call like that. I wish that for all of you. And also,

fortunately, she wasn’t flying on United Airlines that day, or my career, you know…? [laughter] And she wasn’t flying in coach, where you had to buy the headphones. [laughter] Right. But it was a process. She came to California; we met at Quincy Jones’s office and we talked about writing songs. She was a lovely woman and a beautiful artist. Then she went off on her own. I really had nothing to do with the making of her record. Then I read in the paper one day that she was performing the song at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and it was the standout song of the evening. So Norman and I went the next day to see her, and she had a different take on it. She wasn’t singing it the way we’ve all come to know it. It wasn’t quite the same. She had a long guitar solo. And that was it; for a while I heard nothing. Several months later, I didn’t know the record was released. Bear in mind I never had a hit record, so I didn’t know what to look for or how it felt. I didn’t buy Billboard magazine to see where we are as we were reviewed. I just didn’t; I was busy with my other work. I got a call one day from Columbia Pictures Publications in Florida asking me if the print rights were available for “Killing Me Softly,” and I said, “They are. Why are you asking?” And he said, “It’s a big hit. Don’t you know?” And I didn’t, I really didn’t. He said, “It’s all over the radio.” I said, “Really?” So I ran down to the newsstand and I bought all the magazines, and there it was. It was all over... It was like #30 on the charts, and I didn’t even know it was out. No one had called me to tell me the record was released. And the Continued on page 55

“One thing I used to hear a lot from people was, 'Get your own sound.' I think it's a process.” —Charles Fox
Lieberman—she was 18 years old—and we thought she would be our voice. She had a beautiful sound, a lovely young woman. We worked with her for a long time and we developed an album, and we made a deal with Capitol Records for four albums. And the very first of the four albums—plus we had a greatest hits record—we had an open spot, a tenth spot, and Capitol wanted to get the record out and said, “C’mon guys, let’s get the record finished.” So we’re sitting around the piano one day, and Norman had a book of lyrical ideas and thoughts and titles, and he said, “What do you think about the title ‘Killing Me Softly With His Blues’?” We liked the “Killing Me Softly,” but “With the Blues” sounded like an old-fashioned word even in 1972 or ’73. So he thought for a second and said, “What about ‘Killing Me Softly With a Song’?” And we talked about that. That had interesting prospects, because with “Killing Me Softly With a Song”… We all get moved by songs; we all remember music and how it hits us at different ages. Music is so descriptive of
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Recording - March 2012

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