Could It Be Magic. Barry Manilow. 1973. Arista.

 From the time of Liberace’s postwar popularity, the piano has come to play multi-faceted roles in popular music. From an instrument of grossly simplistic, kitsch derived, populist entertainment—Liberace, Roger Williams, Floyd Cramer—to a stationary force of rhythmic bombast—Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis—the piano has gratifyingly served the human impulse to express our emotional venture in exalted musical terms. Somewhere between both poles falls a quartet of commercially successful masters—Billy Joel, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Stevie Wonder—whose talents for audience engagement helps explain the likable proficiency of the bulk of their songwriting output. Could It Be Magic opens the second side of Barry Manilow’s debut record, and your feelings about the song could be wholly dependent upon your feelings for camp. I’m tempted to say that Could It Be Magic is easy listening’s Stairway To Heaven, but not even Robert Plant is shameless enough a lyricist to conceptualize the metaphor, “High up where the stallion meets the sun,” to describe the pinnacle of romantic ideals. Could It Be Magic is camp delirium, as only a commercially obsessed New York pianist reared on Chopin could imagine it; overlong and self serious, the song is a weirdly impersonal attempt to epitomize romantic passion, but it’s sung from within the musical  conventions of what sounds like one man’s loneliness, his obsessive desire to be joined with what he describes as “Angel of my lifetime.” Like Stairway, Could It Be Magic, begins slowly, as if Manilow were wanting you to marinade in his vision of romantic deprivation, then acquires potency, not through tempo, but by a turn of volume, an intensification of expression. Following the second verse, Manilow begins his impersonation of passionate madness, albeit not as a fin-de-siècle European romantic modernist but as a former jingle composer for New York ad agencies. His effort to voice unreasonable sensual excesses is may have been what led Donna Summer to cover Could It Be Magic on her gorgeous 1976 LP A Love Trilogy. When I saw Barry Manilow in concert a few years ago, it was this version—minus the bridge where she parrots orgasmic throes—that he performed. The histrionics had been excised, as if Manilow were assuring us that they belonged to a specific moment, and that whatever issues may have provoked their unfortunate spillover can now be resolved through our current supply of magic, hot yoga say, or doomscrolling.

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