Roberta Flack so utterly owned “Killing Me Softly with His Song” — her signature tune that topped the charts in 1973 — it’s arduous to consider that it wasn’t really her track initially.
In reality, the basic — which received Flack her second consecutive File of the Yr Grammy in 1974, after “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” triumphed in 1973 — was a canopy of Lori Lieberman’s authentic model that appeared on her 1972 self-titled debut album.
“It was a guitar-based folk song,” Lieberman, 73, advised The Put up. “My version was a small folk song.”
However Flack — who died at 88 on Monday after years of well being challenges, together with ALS — reworked “Killing Me Softly with His Song” into one thing a lot larger, a tune for the ages.
“What she gave to that song was priceless, and something I never, ever could have imagined,” mentioned Lieberman, who calls Flack’s definitive rendition “one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.”
“I have endless gratitude to Roberta Flack [for] hearing something within that song to bring it to the world and to change not just my life, but so many with her artistry, her talent and her heart,” she mentioned.
Nevertheless it was Lieberman who was impressed by a person who was “strumming my pain with his fingers” at LA’s Troubadour membership in late 1971.
“I was finishing my first album for Capitol Records, and we needed one more song,” she recalled. “My girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go to a club to hear a singer that I’d never heard of.”
Seems it was a sure “American Pie” troubadour.
“It was Don McLean, and when he sang ‘Empty Chairs,’ it moved me so much because it was about a breakup — and I was going through one at the time — that I wrote a poem on a napkin,” mentioned Lieberman. “And that poem became ‘Killing Me Softly.’ I had felt that he was singing about me and my life. I went to see him, a person I’d never heard of, and I felt that he was reading my diaries.”
Songwriters Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox would flip Lieberman’s poem into track, but it surely was not successful for the younger singer.
That each one modified when Flack found the tune on a flight from Los Angeles to New York.
“At that time, I was a featured artist on American Airlines — they had this in-flight system where they played the whole album,” mentioned Lieberman. “She was listening to the music, and suddenly she heard ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and it resonated with her.”
Whereas listening to the track a number of occasions on the flight, Flack started taking notes to make her personal tackle the tune. And he or she had been figuring out her model together with her band when she she wanted one other track to carry out as an encore whereas opening for Quincy Jones at LA’s Greek Theater in September 1972.
“And so she sang ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and the audience went crazy,” mentioned Lieberman. “And when she walked off stage, Quincy Jones said, ‘Ro, don’t sing that song one more time before you record it!’ ”
Flack recorded the track for her 1973 album “Killing Me Softly,” and with the singer-pianist’s appreciable abilities as an interpreter and arranger, it was a far completely different model than Lieberman’s authentic. “It is almost like two different songs,” she mentioned.
“In addition to starting the song with the chorus, she also added the ‘La, la, la, la, la, la’ part,” mentioned Lieberman, additionally noting Flack’s stronger backbeat. “It opened up the song in such a way that it just took off.”
As a Flack fan, Lieberman was “overwhelmed” with pleasure when her jazzy soul-pop makeover killed the plenty softly, turning into one of many greatest singles of 1973. And twenty years later, it was Flack’s rendition that impressed the Fugees’ hit remake in 1996, exposing the track to an entire new era.
“They would never have recorded the song from my version,” mentioned Lieberman.
However regardless of the 2 artists being bonded by “Killing Me Softly,” Lieberman didn’t really meet Flack till 2019 — when her well being had been compromised after struggling a stroke in 2016.
“I was performing at Carnegie Hall, and she had reached out to me to be a part of her documentary [‘Roberta’] that they were doing, and it meant so much,” she mentioned. “I went to where she was living, and she was sitting in a wheelchair by her piano … She couldn’t talk much, but she said, ‘Lori Lieberman, it’s been so long, so long. I can’t believe it.’ And it was a very, very profound moment.”
Whereas Lieberman continues to carry out and report — releasing her newest album, “Perfect Day,” in November — she credit Flack for having “emboldened me as an artist.”
“She was an incredible musician, an incredible pianist and a beautiful singer,” she mentioned. “She’s one of the greatest artists of my generation, for sure.”
