Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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TYRELL, Steve

Producer, songwriter and singer. He worked in local R&B bands in his native Houston, Texas, then went to New York at age 18 and found a staff position at Scepter Records. Working in A&R during the golden age of the late 1960s, he promoted Dionne Warwick's hits with Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs, as well as producing tracks for B.J. Thomas such as 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' (another Bacharach/David song), a no. 1 in 1969.

TV actor Jamie Walters was born in 1969; when he had hits generated by a sitcom called The Heights nearly 25 years later, 'How Do You Talk to an Angel' and 'Hold On' were written by Tyrell, who had become a multi-talent behind the scenes. His work in music supervision on films included Mystic Pizza and Midnight Crossing, both in 1988, and The Brady Bunch Movie in 1995. Meanwhile he returned to performing in 1991, singing 'The Way You Look Tonight' on the soundtrack to Steve Martin's remake of Father of the Bride, his voice heard on the film's soundtrack albums.

After all this success and experience, most people outside the business had still never heard of Tyrell, so his first album, A New Standard, came as a delicious surprise in 1999 on Atlantic. Writer, critic and life-long Frank Sinatra fan Gene Lees once observed that Sinatra had made things difficult for singers of American standards, because if you sound like Sinatra, you're imitating him, but if you don't sound like Sinatra, you sound like you're doing it wrong. Then along came Tyrell, his smoky drawl influenced, perhaps, by Hoagy Carmichael (from Indiana) and Johnny Mercer (from Georgia), both great songwriters as well as pop stars in their day. With songs by the likes of Ray Noble, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington and other giants, and with sympathetic talent like Harry 'Sweets' Edison, Clark Terry, Plas Johnson and Toots Thielmans in the backing on various tracks, Tyrell's first album stayed in the Billboard Jazz chart for two years, despite some insipid (synthesized?) string arrangements.

Further albums have been Standard Time 2001, the holiday album This Time Of Year 2002, and This Guy's In Love 2003, all on Sony/Columbia; Songs Of Sinatra 2005 on Hollywood, Disney Standards 2006 on Disney, and Back To Bacharach 2008 on Koch. The latter album includes Bacharach, Patti Austin and Herb Alpert as guests on various tracks; On 'What The World Needs Now' the guests are Bacharach, Warwick, Martina McBride, Rod Stewart and James Taylor. The first track on Tyrell's first album in 1999 was 'Give Me The Simple Life', by Harry Ruby and Rube Bloom from 1945, so well suited to his laid-back style that one didn't notice the off-the-shelf arrangement; Bacharach's songs however are very much of their time, and it is not clear that Tyrell shines in the aural equivalent of an early color TV picture of a suburban family room.