Sometime late in 1980 I was asked to write a song for a TV movie: Thin Ice, starring Kate Jackson and the song was to be sung by a cabaret singer known as Jane Olivor. Being a prolific 20-something with two musicals heading to Broadway (another story), I didn’t think it up my alley, but I had always wanted to do a song for a film, so I gave it a shot.
Closer was motivated in part by Jane Olivor’s limited but dramatic vocal range and my classical notion of writing a liebesträum of sorts to accompany the predictable montage scene during which it would surely be sung. And it couldn’t be a theatre song, so I wrote the lyric myself.
What I ended up with was a pop song with ambitions of lieder. Arranged and orchestrated, surprisingly the song was suddenly rejected for being “too good” (honest) — or perhaps too difficult. No, Jane Olivor never sang it, nor anyone else. I tucked it away with other bits of young writing and forged ahead into my dark future of musicals and madness.
Thirty years later, the song found its way to the gifted actor/writer/singer Grant James Varjas. His and Preston Clarke’s alternative rock interpretation is one I never imagined; haunting and nuanced, but far from the lush Hollywood arrangement I had expected in 1980. Yet in its soulful vocal, changing rhythms and the simple plinks of a toy piano I am somehow reminded of my own younger voice and gratefully embrace a lost little song that was, after all, too good for a TV movie.