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| Snapshot from the origin story. |
The Hit
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.
It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.
Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:
“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”
Now, from Boone's perspective:
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.
It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.
Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:
“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”
Now, from Boone's perspective:
