The singer Phil Collins knew made the greatest love songs: “Some of the best”
Any Phil Collins song needed to have the right kind of emotion behind it for it to find its way onto an album.
He never wanted to make another tune in an attempt to have a hit, and even when he was making music for Disney movies in his later career, no one was expecting him to go as hard as he did when making the soundtrack to Tarzan. He was looking to move something in people’s hearts every single time he performed, and that came from years of him listening to the best love songs that he could find.
A lot of that came from hearing what The Beatles had to offer, but you wouldn’t have heard that kind of music if you listened to early Genesis. In fact, it was difficult to find out just what Peter Gabriel was on about if you went into The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway completely blind, but even when Collins got behind the microphone for a few songs, it was going to take a while before he was willing to talk about his own problems.
Even when he made the songs that would become Face Value, he figured that he wasn’t ready to open himself up that much to his audience. His divorce had been far too messy for him to recover from, and even if he had songs that detailed his feelings every single time he walked into the studio, he had to be talked into releasing the record before ‘In the Air Tonight’ blew everything else out of the water.
But even when left to his own devices, it was best for him to have a partner in crime to work with on his songs. Hugh Padgam had helped him define the 1980s by getting the right drum sound for his work, but Collins didn’t want to be known simply as “the singing drummer”. He wanted to tug on people’s heartstrings, and that came out in some of the best ballads that he ever made, a few albums later.
He could definitely keep his drumming chops up on ‘I Don’t Care Anymore’, but tunes like ‘One More Night’ and ‘Against All Odds’ are still some of the most emotional tracks that he has ever made. Getting into that headspace all the time was never going to be easy, but Collins felt that he could count on getting a great song out of anything he did as long as Stephen Bishop was behind everything.
Collins had recorded his fair share of personal songs, but he felt that Bishop was one of the few people who could turn his misery into pure gold, saying, “I think [people] find compassion for their situations in my songs. Understanding. People use music for solace. Somehow, when people are miserable, they put on a miserable song; they want empathy or something. Stephen Bishop writes some of the best love songs because he loves being miserable.”
That’s not even meant as a putdown, either. If you listen to the work that Bishop has done with Collins, he clearly knew what he was doing when he began making a tune like ‘Separate Lives’ for Collins to sing for White Nights. And considering where Collins would be going, he may have picked up a few lessons for when he was writing his love songs for soundtracks. ‘You’ll Be In My Heart’ isn’t necessarily a harrowing song by any means, but that sense of empathy only comes from someone who’s been through the emotional wringer a few times.
Bishop may have a more direct way of making love songs compared to Collins, but their differences are also what made the drummer perfect for interpreting his tunes. A lot of Collins’s greatest work was always defined by how he was feeling, and even if he could make the odd detour now and again, Bishop’s brand of songwriting is the kind of gut punch that anyone is looking for out of their favourite artists.
