The 1999 album Phil Collins was always destined to make: “Tailormade”
By the time Phil Collins left Genesis, it felt like he had done everything that he could do as a pop star.
He wasn’t ready to give up life at the top of the musical world or anything, but by the time that Both Sides came out, he knew that he had reached his peak as a songwriter and that there was nothing else that he really needed to cross off his bucket list. He wasn’t ready to give up his penchant for hits, though, and even in a decade that hated him as much as the 1990s did, he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.
Because you have to understand that for every musician who claimed Collins was a major influence, there were just as many people who were trying their best to tear him down. Noel Gallagher hated everything that Collins stood for from the moment he started his solo career, and even if he was able to back down from some of his more nasty comments in recent years, it’s not like a few people couldn’t see where the Oasis songwriter was coming from.
Collins was becoming overexposed just like every other adult contemporary rock star from the 1980s, and while people didn’t need to hear anything that glossy at the time, it’s not like the music started suffering or anything. Dance into the Light is still a late-career highlight for Collins with the title track and ‘It’s In Your Eyes’, but his real mark on the decade came right at the end when he was contacted by Disney.
The thought of Collins becoming the next composer for ‘The House of Mouse’ may have been strange at the time, but it wasn’t exactly a terrible idea by any stretch. Elton John had created some of the greatest tunes for The Lion King and earned himself some of the highest praise of his career, and even if Collins didn’t know how to read or write sheet music, he fell in perfectly when he understood what Tarzan needed.
If you’re telling the story of a man that spent his entire life in the jungle, that would involve a lot more percussion than the average soundtrack, and being able to run wild with those songs was what made Collins fall in love with the project as he was writing it, saying, “I have to be honest, the thing that motivated me at first was the rhythmic possibility. The beat was very tribal, and it seemed tailormade for what I do with the drums.” And you can hear a lot of that in what Collins was doing in the background.
Sure, everyone loves to sing along when they hear a song like ‘Strangers Like Me’, but if you look at the way that the song’s constructed, it’s like a drummer’s paradise. The kick drum sounds absolutely massive on the tune, and when you look at the way that he approaches a lot of the piano chords, all of them are syncopated, which makes it far more interesting than the traditional score that tends to be a bit more regal.
Then again, the song that nabbed Collins the Oscar is there for a reason. ‘You’ll Be In My Heart’ is one of the most tearjerking songs to come out of Disney, and I don’t say that lightly, folks. There are a lot of hits amongst the Disney renaissance and for as much as Robin Williams kills ‘Friend Like Me’ in Aladdin and Angela Lansbury’s performance of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is absolutely untouchable, Collins’s song deserves to be in that company.
Most people didn’t need to go the extra mile like he did when making this kind of soundtrack, but Collins didn’t want to make a few songs for movies that were a bunch of fluff. Everything that he made was about trying to challenge himself a little bit more, but this is one of the few times when he made songs that no one could top.
