Let It Go Now: The David Forman Story
How we discovered a lost masterpiece from 1977
Today, Record Lung brings you this exclusive excerpt from “Let It Go Now: The David Forman Story,” Joe Hagan’s extensive liner notes for Forman’s 1977 album, Who You Been Talking To.
On sale January 23rd from High Moon Records. Pre-order the LP or CD HERE. Listen to the title track HERE.
For decades, David Forman was hiding in plain sight. His only major-label album, recorded for Arista in 1976, had become a staple of thrift-shop dollar bins, as easy to come by as it was invisible to cultural memory.
Maybe it was the album cover, featuring a soft-focus black-and-white portrait of a wan and serious artist. The record-buying public could hardly be blamed for assuming Forman was yet another sensitive singer-songwriter of the Dan Hill or Fogelberg variety. The vagaries of commercial packaging had virtually camouflaged David Forman to history. Which is strange considering that Rolling Stone magazine, at the peak of its critical influence in the mid-1970s, had declared David Forman a songwriter on the same level as Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon and Tom Waits. His singing was compared to Curtis Mayfield’s and Smokey Robinson’s. His album was roundly praised as “an artistic success.” David Forman was a critic’s darling—before disappearing.
As it happens, vinyl obscurities are the stock in trade of a listening group my friends and I formed a few years ago to discover outliers like Forman in the dregs of the bargain bins. When one of us procured Forman’s Arista LP and dropped the needle on the first track, “Dream of a Child,” the collective reaction was immediate and unanimous: “Where has this guy been all of our lives?” The blue-eyed soul vocals, the gorgeously melancholic piano, the oddly specific lyrics name-checking Philip Marlowe and Brenda Lee, the spare R&B production by Joel Dorn—a name we knew from classic mid-’60s Atlantic Records cuts—David Forman seemed algorithmically targeted to our tastes. We lunged for our search engines.
A fortuitous detail emerged: David Forman lived only a half-hour from my house in the Hudson Valley of New York. The photographer Tim Davis, a catalyzing force of our listening group, screwed up the courage to email David and ask him out to lunch that same week.
David Forman!!! I have had the exquisite privilege of listening to your solo album twelve times in the last week … Though prone to hyperbole, I am not exaggerating when I say that it is one of the most extraordinary records I have ever heard. It is as if Donny Hathaway somehow fused to Randy Newman, or Al Green to Tom Waits, but with more feeling. Everything about the songwriting moves me, and the performances are just ecstatically perfect.
David wrote back:
Well, Jeez! Are you sure you wanna meet me? Such an encounter can only be a disappointment. I kid, I kid. As Rickles would say, I kid because I love, I love. By the way, anybody who likes that record THAT MUCH must be crazy.
When Forman showed up at a local lunch spot—sporting a soul patch, long hair tucked into a newsboy cap, and a distinct Brooklyn accent—David’s voluble personality, robust appetite for rare steak, and easygoing humor immediately put us at ease. We gushed with questions and Forman filled in the blanks: He’d been singing doo-wop since 14, developed his blue-eyed soul style performing with Aaron Neville, and had sung a hugely famous advertising jingle in the early 1980s (“Tum tum-tum-tum TUUUUUMS!”). That starkly serious cover photograph on his Arista album? Forman had a toothache that day and couldn’t smile. Record mogul Clive Davis, bafflingly, had wanted Forman to be the next Barry Manilow.
We were also eager to confirm an online rumor: Was it true that Forman recorded a second record for Arista in 1977, produced by none other than Jack Nitzsche? The storied arranger and keyboardist had virtually invented Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound in the early ’60s, putting his fingerprints on classic recordings by the Ronettes, Jackie De Shannon, and the Righteous Brothers. He’d performed as a sideman to the Rolling Stones, produced Neil Young’s Harvest, scored the soundtrack to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and married Buffy Sainte Marie.
We had to know: Did this record exist?
“Yeah, I’ve got a copy at home,” David said casually between bites of steak. “You wanna hear it?”
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Hal Willner, the late musical director for Saturday Night Live, renowned curator and producer of artists like Lou Reed and Lucinda Williams, was clearing out his offices at 30 Rock in the early 2000s when he found a reel-to-reel copy of David Forman’s unreleased record on the shelves. Forman had sent it to Willner in 1977 and it had sat gathering dust, waiting for providence.
Forman digitized the album and shared it with a few friends, and then lost the original tapes in a move. But in March 2022, Forman brought a CD copy over to my house, where our listening group sat anxiously in front of the speakers.
The moment we heard the gigantic guitar riff ushering in the chorus of “Let It Go Now,” Forman’s falsetto rising through columns of angelic backup singers amid Jack Nitzsche’s cavernous production, we realized we were hearing something magical and new. As Tim Davis would later put it, the music sprang to life before us like “the first flight of a genetically revived pterodactyl.” Song after song, a treasure chest poured gold at our feet: “Who You Been Talking To,” a smokey, exquisite Motown groove; “A-Train Lady,” a subway soul serenade that had us snapping our fingers like hoods from West Side Story; “Little Asia,” a sphinxlike ballad of high cinematic intensity. Every song seemed to walk out of a fantasy of 1960s New York: the rolling R&B piano of “What Is So Wonderful”; the spoken-word art song of “Losing,” with its haunted downtown atmospherics; the achingly desperate ballad, “We Both Talk Too Much”; the Latin bounce of “Midnight Mambo” with the hilarious lyric “my Mama used to go/down on Perry Como”; and “30 Dollars,” a lurid back-alley come-on seemingly piped in from a James Ellroy novel:
Thirty dollars get you a room, boy
Get your breakfast at Ritchie’s Bar
Cockfight, peep show, live show
Anything you want
Anything you want
I got lost last night at the Plaza
And I ran like hell
To the Golden Key
Police that busted my partner
Took my last thirty dollars from me
Forman casually named the boldfaced L.A. session players as they passed across the speakers: Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Fred Tackett, and Scott Matthews on guitars; Jim Keltner on drums; Tim Drummond on bass; Steve Douglas on saxophone; Earl Turbinton on bass clarinet; and Jack Nitzsche himself on Fender Rhodes.
We had stumbled into a fantastic and unlikely mix of—well, what was this? How to describe David Forman? You could point to influences: Randy Newman, Aaron Neville, Tom Waits, Marvin Gaye—yes, all of those, but none of them quite. We heard a kinship to the girl-group soul on Laura Nyro’s 1971 album Gonna Take a Miracle, with the LaBelle sisters, but with the persona and wit of a specific kind of literate street tough, a ’50s doo-wopper singing from the shadows of a 1970s noir.
If we were a little in shock, so was Forman. It was as if he was hearing his own record for the first time after having long considered it a personal failure, the demarcation point in which his life and music took a turn away from the possibility of chart-topping stardom.
The next day, I called my friend Lucas Van Lenten at High Moon Records, in Brooklyn, and said, “I’ve got something I want you to hear.”
This is great! I’m definitely picking up the album.
I recently watched “American Epic” which tells the story of finding Mississippi John Hurt in Avalon Mississippi from a lyric in one of his songs after decades of obscurity. When they find him, he doesn’t even have a guitar to play music and had long given up on being a musician.
Both stories are weepy beautiful. The fact that a group of friends who embrace communal listening experiences found the record and it ended up that he lived so close by is humbling. Your musical geek troupe is truly enviable.