The song Quincy Jones told Roberta Flack to stop singing
“Your music will never be more or less than you are as a human being,” Nadia Boulanger told Quincy Jones in 1957. From then on, he vowed to only ever bring authenticity into his work.
A mainstay of pop music for decades, Jones entered the industry through jazz initially, learning several tricks that would later define his approach to other projects. Because, of course, jazz introduced several defining structures that we still hear today, but none of this compares to the one thing it did to enlighten countless musicians and inspire them to greatness: draw from the power of emotion and intuition.
But Jones raked up an impressive list of credentials in the years that followed that made him one of the most coveted musical figures in the entire industry, meaning that, by the time it came to working with Michael Jackson in the late-1970s, he was already seen as some sort of musical deity. Jones could effectively take a good idea and transform it into a world smash, and that’s why Off The Wall set off a long-term collaboration that effectively made the King of Pop’s career.
But his approach didn’t always draw from experience; yes, Jones got his name because of his impressive resume, but he was also the kind of hardhead that makes for some of the industry’s best and most well-known leaders. The type that just seems to have the answer to everything, with an intuition that runs bone-deep, purely because they just know exactly what to do and when to do it. The kind that’s never complicated because it runs on gut instinct.
Or the kind that’s so emotionally embedded in the present it just feels right. As Rick Rubin once said, “All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.” This is the exact feeling Jones got when he first heard Roberta Flack perform ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. Flack had listened to the original version on a flight and immediately wanted to record her own, deciding to debut it when she once opened for Jones in LA.
As you’d expect, the audience was immediately besotted, so much that Jones felt the fire burning, and turned to her to say, “Ro, don’t sing that doggone song no more until you record it.” And he was right: not only did Flack spend extra time in the studio, making sure she’d get her version right, she also recorded a version that built with a palpable kind of energy, or tension, like her voice mysteriously dances around the subject for a while without ever really revealing its secrets.
It was so unique and self-assured that it became impossible to replicate (save for The Fugees’ version, which was excellent for different reasons), no matter how many karaoke-goers tried, because, above all, Flack’s voice evoked a certain charm that set a new standard, tender, but also casually confident. The kind that she likely felt that first time she heard it, because she knew exactly which buttons to press to make it even better.
And maybe this was first spurred by competitiveness at seeing an image of Lori Lieberman in a magazine (“I read it with interest to see what she had that I didn’t”), but that first performance also generated a certain magic that Jones was privy to – that moment of sheer musical greatness that made him want to protect it as his own, because it was just too powerful to be out in the open without any real claim.
