Brooklyn Blues by Barry Manilow

Album: Swing Street (1987)

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In this blues number from his Swing Street album, Barry Manilow is an East Coast transplant living the high life in Los Angeles but missing his native Brooklyn. Although many of the details match up with the soft-rock legend's own life - he grew up in Brooklyn, relocated to Los Angeles in the '70s and eventually settled into a Bel-Air mansion - he didn't write the lyrics. He composed the melody and sent it to his collaborators Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman.

"I was calling it 'The Keap Street Blues' at that point," Manilow recalled in the liner notes to his 1992 anthology, The Complete Collection And Then Some. "I wanted to write a blues song to be sung by a New York guy from Keap Street in Brooklyn. Bruce and Jack made the lyric so personal that most people thought I'd written the words."
This was written during what Sussman dubbed "The Gray Period." The creators were stuck in limbo after the commercial failure of Manilow's previous album, Manilow, at RCA. The singer returned to his Arista home, but didn't know how to proceed with this career. They spent a year experimenting with different styles, which were all dead ends until Manilow came up with the idea for a contemporary swing album.

"Why don't we just do what we like… what turns us on?" Manilow asked Sussman over the phone. "Brooklyn Blues" was the first song to follow, and it set the tone for the rest of the album.
The tune was arranged by Eddie Arkin, who was "so blown away by the hipness, I wanted to unzip his skin and peer inside just to make sure there weren't any Steely Dan's living in there!" Arkin, who also co-wrote the album's track "Big Fun," thought "Brooklyn Blues" was so elegant that he wanted to treat it like a classic, so he based the instrumental interlude on one of the Gershwin Preludes.
This features Blues Brothers saxophonist Tom Scott, who also played on the Swing Street cut "Black And Blue."
The album's lead single, this peaked at #20 on the Adult Contemporary chart. The second single, "Hey Mambo," a Latin-style duet with Kid Creole, just barely made the Hot 100 at #90.
Manilow believes his Brooklyn roots are integral to his sound. He told the Chicago-Sun Times in 1987: "I live in laid-back LA, but in my heart, I'm an energetic New Yorker and that's what has always come out of my music. I've always been surprised when the critics said I made wimpy little ballads."

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