Barry Mann (born February 9, 1939) is an American songwriter and musician, and part of a successful songwriting partnership with his wife, Cynthia Weil. He has written or co-written 53 hits in the UK and 98 in the US.
Mann was born Barry Imberman, to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City, two days before fellow songwriter Gerry Goffin. When he was twelve years old he began writing songs as a hobby. He studied architecture at the Pratt Institute for a year before dropping out to write and record songs. He played piano on some demos.
His first successful song as a writer was "She Say (Oom Dooby Doom)", a Top 20 chart-scoring song composed for the band The Diamonds in 1959. Mann co-wrote the song with Mike Anthony (Michael Logiudice). In 1961, Mann had his greatest success to that point with "I Love How You Love Me", written with Larry Kolber and a no. 5 scoring single for the band The Paris Sisters, (seven years later, Bobby Vinton's version would score in the Top 10). The same year, Mann himself reached the Top 40 as a performer with a novelty song co-written with Gerry Goffin, "Who Put the Bomp", which parodied the nonsense words of the then-popular doo-wop genre.
Despite his success as a singer, Mann chose to channel his creativity into songwriting, forming a prolific partnership with Weil, a lyricist he met while both were staff songwriters at Don Kirshner and Al Nevin's company Aldon Music, whose offices were located in Manhattan near the famed composing-and-publishing factory the Brill Building. Mann and Weil, who married in 1961, developed some songs intended to be socially conscious, with successes such as "Uptown" by The Crystals, "We Gotta Get out of This Place" by the Animals, "Magic Town" by The Vogues, and "Kicks" by Paul Revere & the Raiders.
They found that they could write songs independently of each other, in pairs with other songwriters or with each other. They were adept at writing pop songs of almost any type. Under contract with Aldon, they wrote songs for many pop stars in the 60's, including Eydie Gorme, Paul Peterson, Shelley Fabares, and Dickey Lee. As the decade wore on, they turned to urban protest songs, love songs, and songs that in general were in tune with the times.
They were the only Brill team to write directly for Paul Revere and the Raiders, and their 1964 classic "You Lost That Lovin' Feeling" by the Righteous Brothers virtually redefined that scope and depth of pop songwriting, co-written Phil Spector, was the most played song of the 20th century, with more than 14 million plays.Also with Spector they wrote some of the best Ronettes songs, like "You Baby" and "Walking In the Rain". The couple left Aldon Music and moved to Los Angeles in the late 60s, kept writing hits, mostly for country artists and began writing for Broadway.
Barry attempted a solo career and finally got to make albums via a deal with RCA. In 1975 he had a minor hit with "The Princess and the Punk." Later hits with which Mann is associated with include "Here You Come Again" by Dolly Parton and "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill, both from 1987. Barry Mann and James Horner composed the music for the 1986 animated film An American Tail. Mann came up with songs such as Sometimes When We Touch and movie scores such as that for I Never Sang For My Father. Weil co-wrote He's So Shy with Tom Snow for The Pointer Sisters and worked on some projects with Lionel Richie. Together their ambition has always been to write a Broadway show, but so far it is unfulfilled.
Mann has composed songs for movies, most notably "Somewhere Out There", co-written with Weil and James Horner, for the 1986 animated movie An American Tail. Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram performed the song as a duet during the movie's closing credits; their version was released as a single, which scored No. 2 on the Billboards charts and became a "gold"-scoring record. "Somewhere Out There" would win two 1987 Grammy Awards, as Song of the Year and Best Song Written for a Motion Picture or Television. Mann's other movie work includes the scores for I Never Sang for My Father and Muppet Treasure Island, and songs for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Oliver & Company.
Mann co-wrote, with Dan Hill, the song "Sometimes When We Touch," which scored No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1987, Mann and Weil were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. As of May 2009, Mann's song catalogue lists 635 songs. He has received 56 popular music, country, and Rhythm & Blues awards from Broadcast Music Inc., and 46 Millionaire Awards for radio performances numbering more than one million plays. Mann and Weil were named among the 2010 recipients of Ahmet Ertegun Award from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2011, they received the Johnny Mercer Award, the greatest honour from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Mann and Weil now operate a publishing company named Dyad Music and reside in Beverly Hills, California. (Edited mainly from Wikipedia)