I don't really pay that much attention to pop music ever since I got into metal. It is pretty undeniable that some songs because massive and unavoidable hits and they end up everywhere. While I maintained no illusion that Brittney Spears or Madonna were plugging away at a piano with a pen in order to create their next big hit, I was a bit unaware that there are people like David Foster who actually do basically all of it for them.
Like most people, the name David Foster didn't really mean anything to me despite the fact that he has won more Grammy awards than all of the artists that he created music for. In this tell-all documentary, David Foster lets us see the inside of his life and his rise to fortune through being what many people consider to be the best producer of all time.
The story starts out slow and with humble beginnings showing how his relatively poor family struggled to make ends meet but still did their best to attempt to nurture David's obvious musical talents. One of the earliest moments of his abilities was how he was noticed by his parents for having "perfect pitch" and could identify any note simply by hearing it from across the room.
I can tune a guitar without a tuner because over the years I can hear what an "E" sounds like. That's the extent of it for me.
He would go on to work as a studio musician after kind of failing as an actual member of bands and rose to the forefront when he ended up working with the band Chicago to totally change their sound and make them household names rather than a kind of popular rock n roll band. It was during this time that his direct contributions to the band lead to their album sales going from a still impressive hundred thousand copies to multiple millions of copies with the Chicago 16, 17, and 18 albums.
With their major hits during this time Foster wrote all of the hits primarily with Peter Cetera, while the rest of the band started to feel as though they were being left out of the creative process and this resulted in Cetera, who was the bass player and lead singer of Chicago, leaving the band.
He is a master composer and this is evidenced in the soundtrack for the film St Elmo's Fire whose soundtrack is considerably better than the, what I consider to be, over-rated movie. One of the songs in that film entitled *Love Scene from St Elmo's Fire" due to not having a real song name cracked the top 20 on the charts. I don't think I need to remind you that instrumentals with no lyrics don't often reach these heights.
Foster's ear for what the masses want to hear before they know they want to hear it is undeniable. He is definitely a very talented musician but for some reason can only write it for other people rather than pursue these endeavors himself.
He is responsible for the "I will always Love You" hit by Whitney Houston (and yes, I know it is a Dolly song) and he is also responsible for the fact that any of us even know who Celine Dion is. I personally, could do without that but I suppose it is pretty evident that she is extremely talented. I just had to listen to it far too often thanks to my mother playing "I'm your Lady" entirely too much at home.
I found myself listening to every word of this documentary despite the fact that I am not a fan of mainstream music. It is really interesting (and a bit disappointing) to see the process that goes into the creation of hit songs.
Should I watch it?
Since I went into this feeling as though I would just be cringing throughout and ended up really enjoying it I would say that this documentary has a better-than-average chance of appealing to almost anyone, even if you don't appreciate the actual songs. Producers are a massive part of the reason why certain bands and primarily solo artists end up making it big and in this game it appears as though there are very few people that can make that happen more than David Foster. His life is extraordinary, that is for certain... and so is this film.