The gentleman we are talking about, and the co-writer of that song is Stacy Widelitz. Along the way Stacy has worked with Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, Steve Cropper, Ray Manzarek, Glenn Frey of the Eagles, Quincy Jones, Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. He's served as president of the board of Grammy nominated ALIAS Chamber Ensemble, was the past president of the boards of Nashville Opera and Leadership Music, and is currently president of the Nashville Opera Guild. And if all of those accomplishments aren't enough, he's also an award-winning photographer. Stacy Widelitz spoke with us about his life and his music.

Q - Stacy, whatever happened to this Band Director who sent a note home to your parents saying you exhibit "No musical ability whatsoever."?

A - (laughs)

Q - Does he know about the success you've had?

A - Yeah. He had a great comeuppance thanks to my mother actually. His name was Mr. Severoli. That was when I was in the fourth grade and I had been assigned the flute by the elementary school band program. I just couldn't make heads of tails of the thing. It just made no sense to me whatsoever. Finally he sent me home with a note, as you said, saying "Please return Stacy's flute. I'm dropping him from the band program as he exhibits no musical ability whatsoever." My mother had a memory like a steel trap. She never forgot his name. In 1996 or 1997 I was living in Los Angeles, writing music for TV and film. At that time there was a lot of scoring work. My mother was working in kind of a high end department store in Long Island and there as an older couple buying something and she looked at the credit card and it said Joseph Severoli. So she said, "Are you the same Joe Severoli that used to teach music in the Plainville music system?" He said, "Yeah. How did you know that?" She said, "Well, you flunked my son out of the band program and said he had no musical ability at all." Severoli's wife turned to him and said, "Why would you do something like that?" And he said, it was the perfect setup, "Well, it's my job to weed out those that didn't exhibit musical ability. I was a teacher. That's what I was supposed to do." So, he turned to my mother and said, "Well how is he? What's he doing now?" And my mother just looked at him dead pan and said, "He's a professional composer in Los Angeles and he was just nominated for an Emmy for a score he did." Severoli's wife evidently looked at him and said, "See Mr. big shot!" It took many, many years, but he finally did get his comeuppance for that. He was a musician. I believed he played clarinet and saxophone and he was on the wedding and bar mitzvah circuit on weekends on Long Island. Eventually he left music and started a fairly successful pasta company. Occasionally you'd see a truck that said Severoli's Ravioli, or something like that.

Q - Is he still alive today?

A - No. I doubt it. He was quite a bit older when that story occurred with my mother. That was something like twenty-five years ago.

Q - If you really think about it, maybe this guy did you a favor. Wouldn't it be harder to be a composer if your instrument was a flute? I don't know if you can compose on a flute or not. It would seem to be easier to compose on a piano, which you took up thanks to your cousin.

A - Yes. In a way it was a favor in a couple of ways. It also gave me a healthy suspicion of academics. Maybe schools didn't know everything they purported to know about musical ability and how to teach music or anything of that, which is probably why I quit college after two years. But yes, I do know a lot of composers that play other instruments, but generally anybody that plays on an instrument like (the) trumpet or flute will also at some point take up piano for the various reasons you cited. It's easier to learn theory on a piano. It's easier to have it make more sense they way the piano is set up in a logical fashion. So yeah, and I was self-motivated at the piano. I wasn't for the flute.

Q - I guess your first big break was when you wrote the theme song for The Richard Simmons Show. How did you get your music to that show? Did you have a song plugger?

A - No. I co-wrote that theme with my then girlfriend who was a great singer named Wendy Fraser, who later sang on "She's Like The Wind" actually. We were living together in New York and I was writing music for industrial shows and local jingles and was kind of getting frustrated with the career advancement, and Wendy's father was a television producer named Woody Fraser. I had met him. He had come to New York. We hung out with Wendy for a couple of evenings and we got along extremely well and I played him some of the music I was writing for these industrial shows. We had excellent clients. It was on a high level. He said, "Wow! This music is great!" So, I was talking to Wendy about my frustrations. She said, "You know, I think my father has a new show. Let's call him and see if they have music already for it." So, we spoke to him and he said, "No, we don't have the music yet." He said, "I'll let you submit, not giving it to you. These are the conditions: I have to like it because I'm the Executive Producer. My wife has to like it because she's one of the producers. The star has to like it," and I didn't know who the star was at that point. I don't think I would've known his name anyway. And he said, "And the syndicator has to like it that's putting the show out there. And if you can satisfy all four, then you'll get it." Wendy and I wrote something and called him and played it for him over the phone. Me at the piano and Wendy doing the melody. There was this pause and he said, "That's really good." And then we could hear him call his wife to the phone. We played it for her and she said, "Wow! That's really good." So, we had two down. So, we sent a cassette, again just piano and voice, to California and he called us back and said, "Everybody loves it. The star loves it too. I booked a recording session for you and you're flying here in a few days and you're going to record it here in Los Angeles", which was actually a terrifying prospect because with musicians I didn't know and certainly on a whole different level. But, we went out there and we did it and the show was The Richard Simmons Show. It became a huge success. About a year after it debuted on television, Wendy and I realized that to really capitalize on it we really had to move to Los Angels, and so we did in the Fall of 1981, thinking maybe that could be a wedge to get further things, but we really shouldn't expect to get any more work like this for a year at least while we were breaking in. But, we actually booked another theme song within three months of arriving there.

Q - For a TV show?

A - For another TV show.

Q - When you write a song, is it important that the words and music come quickly so you don't lose interest?

A - No, not necessarily. Here in Nashville (where Stacy Widelitz now calls home) the culture is such that there are actually writers who will do two writing sessions a day. I've run into writers here who are frustrated that they don't have something by the end of the session. My feeling is always I'd rather it be really good and get it right than just try to rush it through. I always go back to Leonard Cohen, who worked on the song "Hallelujah" for at least two years, and then of course Flaubert spent fifteen years writing Madame Bovary. To me, it's not about the amount of time or losing interest. I'll lose interest if I look at it again and say, "You know what? This really wasn't going anywhere." But, if I feel it's something that has a good germ of an idea, then it's worth working on.

Q - You wrote "She's Like The Wind" with Patrick Swayze.

A - Right.

Q - Is that the only song you wrote with Patrick Swayze?

A - No. We wrote a few others actually and then we co-wrote a song that ended up in the movie Roadhouse called "Cliffs Edge". That's on the soundtrack album from Roadhouse, but Roadhouse wasn't anywhere near the success immediately that Dirty Dancing was. So, the soundtrack album never really took off, but Roadhouse kind of built up a cult following over the years. So, it's still fun to see it pop up in my royalty statements from a television show. It played on HBO, so I'll see a royalty from that.

Q - Could you guys have written more songs? What would have prohibited that? Maybe Patrick Swayze's film schedule? Although I think there was a time when he didn't have much going on.

A - Yeah. There was some periods following Dirty Dancing and Roadhouse. Roadhouse wasn't critically received. Everybody thought he was a flash in the pan in Dirty Dancing and that's the end of it. But then he did Ghost and that was a smash. So, he was a little leery of pursuing a record deal. He didn't want to be perceived as David Hasselhoff or even John Travolta. Some of these actors that did records. He had a lot of offers following the success of "She's Like The Wind". If he was going to do it, he wanted to do it with a sense of integrity and not just because it's a chance for me to make a ton of money. Whatever he did, he wanted it to be good.

Q - That's understandable.

A - Personal pride.

Q - You had an opportunity to speak with two guys who are no longer with us. I'm curious as to what you talked about with Ray Manzarek.

A - Well, the way I met Ray... This would have been 1990. I was working on a TV show. I was working on a TV show called Eerie Indiana for NBC, scoring some of the episodes. It was actually one of my favorite shows that I worked on. My agent called me. I was with the William Morris Agency. My agent, Joel, called me and he said, "I've got a guy here sitting in my office who's interested in learning more about scoring work and how it works, and the differences between that. He comes from the Rock world." So Joel said, "While you're working on Eerie I thought maybe he could stop by and watch you work." And I was reluctant. I said, "I'm really used to working in a room by myself. I don't know how I'd feel about somebody looking over my shoulder. It would be a distraction." And then I said, "Who is it?" And he said "It's Ray Manzarek." The second Doors album, "Strange Days" is one of my favorite records of all time to this day. When I was a kid I spent hours learning all the keyboard parts from it that Ray did. So, I paused and say, "Ray Manzarkek of The Doors is in your office?" And he said, "Yeah." "And he wants to come watch me work?" And he said, "Yeah." And so I said, "Okay." So, Ray came over the next day. First off he was just one of he nicest, humblest people. And at first he was watching me work and occasionally would ask a question of "How did you do that>" or "How did you time this?" After a few hours I said to him, "You know what? I want to take a break. So, why don't we go into the living room and I'll make some tea and we can just sit and chat for a little bit." And so I did. We were sitting there, talking.. He came over for another day as well. But, we were chatting mostly about the movie The Doors that Oliver Stone was doing and Ray mentioned that he had his name taken off the film because he felt it was a bad portrayal of who Jim Morrison really was. So, we were talking about that and that was interesting. Then it was very funny. At one point I just looked at him. I remember I was in a rocking chair and he was sitting on the couch across from me and I said, "You have to give me thirty seconds." And he looked at me and said, "Why?" I said, "Just give me thirty seconds." He said, "Okay." And I just looked at the floor and said, "I can't believe Ray Manzarek is in my apartment. I cant' believe it." I repeated it like six times. Then I looked at him and said, "Okay. I'm done." And he was laughing. The fun thing was about a month later, the thing with Eerie Indiana was it was almost like The Twilight Zone meets The Wonder Years. I think it was kind of a precursor to the show Stranger Things. It allowed me free reign musically because of the science fiction and musical elements to explore a lot of fairly wild musical stuff. So, about a month after Ray came to watch me work, I was standing in a music store. West L.A. Music, in line at the counter because I needed to buy some cables, and it was crowded. The whole store was crowded and I knew the manager there. So, at one point I hear this kind of whispery buzz going around the room saying "It's Ray Manzarek. It's Ray Manzarek." So, I looked up and there in the doorway is Ray Manzarek with the manager whom I knew. Ray is looking around and he saw me in line and yelled out across the store, pointed at me and said, "Get that man some service. That man is a genius." Everybody's looking at me like, "Who the hell are you?" I was just both embarrassed and also incredibly gratified that one of my boyhood idols would say something like that.

Q - Especially a big Doors fan like yourself.

A - Yes, especially that second album. I like the first album quite a bit too, but the second album is just amazing.

Q - What was Glenn Fry like to talk to?

A - He was a very nice person actually. The way I got to know him somewhat was through a TV show that he was starring in that I co-scored with my dear friend Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, the great guitarist. It was a terrible show called Sounds Of Sunset. I think it set a record for the fastest cancellation ever at that time. The show was canceled after its first fifteen minutes on the air, which was really funny. Jeff and I were put through Hell because the producers didn't know which episode to premiere with. So, we had to score three of the episodes in ten days, which was murderous. But, Glenn came to Jeff's studio a couple of times 'cause they knew each other well. It was very funny, at this point I was living in Venice, California in a very nondescript kind of working class neighborhood. Glenn had to deliver something to my house. It was a tape of a song that was going to be incorporated into the show. So, I'll never forget. The doorbell rang and I opened the door and there was Glenn Fry standing there. He's looking up and down my block. He looked at me and said, "What are you, in the Witness Protection Program?", which was very funny. He was driving like this Ford van. I said, "You're the one driving a van." But, he was a nice guy. The best thing about doing it and getting nicely paid was the wrap party. Glenn put together a band and performed at one of the back lots of Paramount Studios for only a hundred and fifty to two hundred people that worked on the show. And it was him and Jeff Baxter and Joe Walsh. This incredible band. I was just standing there listening to them, thinking "God, I can't believe nobody's recording this. This is great!"

Q - And now, besides writing songs, you've taken up photography. What are you taking pictures of?

A - Of people. The genre is street photography and I do it in black and white 'cause I grew up just obsessed with old black and white movies, usually film noir. Then my parents were very artsy, so they always had coffee table books of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who's one of the greatest street photographers ever, based in Paris. I loved looking at his work. Quite by accident I was in Tuscany in 2015 for a songwriter's workshop and I knew it was going to be my first time in Italy and I thought, "I'm going to get a better camera." I took travel photos, just this little Canon One Shot thing, and I bought this Sony camera and when I was playing around with it I saw it had a black and white function. So, I had a day free in Florence and I wandered around Florence, taking pictures in black and white. I was pretending like I was in an old movie and then I looked at some of the photos, especially one that I got of this young woman smoking a cigarette in a cafe and I showed it to a friend of mine at this songwriter workshop. I said, "I swear to God I think some of these are really good photos," and she said, "Oh, they are!" I posted a few of them to Facebook and one of the best photographers in Nashville lives around the block from me, Jerry Atnip. We're Facebook friends. When I was back from Italy in the Fall of 2015 I was walking my dog through the neighborhood and he stopped his car and asked me if I had been posting archival photos from Italy 'cause they kind of have an old feel to them. I said, "If you mean the black and white photos, no. I took those." He looked at me and said, "You took those photos?" I said, "Yeah. Why?" He said, "Well, they're really good and you have to bring a camera wherever you travel." And so I did. I think my next trip was Havana. Just over the course of the next couple of years, wherever I went I took time to wander around taking pictures of people. I got a couple of them print cut in 2018. The place that printed them out was a professional shop and the woman there said, "Did you take these photos?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "Do you have more like this?" I said, "Yeah. Why?" She said, "Go buy a portfolio and start filling it with more prints because we think you're on to something." And so I did and then that turned into me getting my first show here in Nashville at a place called The Arts Company. We had about fifteen of my pieces up. We called the show, "Second Act." Amazingly to me, some of the pieces sold. And it turned into a thing and I got more shows. I just found out recently that the Nashville Airport is going to do an exhibit of my work starting at the end of October (2023). There's another gallery where we're in discussions about a show the early part of next year. (2024). So, it's been fun. I think the most fun part of it is not being a young person anymore and finding an entirely fresh means of expression.

Q - If you were taking photos of people on the streets of the United States, would you need their permission? I take it you don't need their permission overseas.

A - You don't need their permission here either if it's in public.

Q - If you saw an attractive woman in a bikini on a beach in the U.S. could you take her photo?

A - Yeah. She's in public. If I was say a paparazzi and I was using a telephoto lens to try and capture her house, that's an invasion of privacy. But I also have a bit of an ethical rule. If somebody sees me taking their picture and objects, I show them that I deleted it from the camera. But I've had the opposite happen. I actually had this happen in Paris when I was there two months ago (April, 2023) where a guy was with his girlfriend and he saw me take his picture and he motioned to me. He said, "Did you just take our picture?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Hmmm... Let me see it." So, I showed it to him in the camera and it was black and white in the camera. In the picture he looks like a movie star. And he looked at it and he just looked at me and said, "Wow!" I said, "I know. You look like a star." He said, "That's really good." I said, "Well, it's something I do. I have shows." So he said, "Okay. Go ahead and keep it." So, it was the opposite effect of when he saw the photo he was actually very pleased.

Q - So, you take photos of people who look like stars. Could the next step be to take photos of actual stars, whether they be in music or film?

A - It could be. I'm not used to a studio setting. I'm really used to being on the street. I did get approached by a local dancer here in Nashville, of Modern Dance. She was involved in a dance production I took photos of, one of which was in my first show. She e-mailed me and said that she was working on a new, solo piece and would I take pictures of her rehearsal process? And that was a lot of fun. The way I did it was I said, "I'm going to watch you rehearse, but I don't want you to pose. I want you to keep rehearsing and thinking and I'll catch you along the way. I ended up with a lot of good photos of her that she loved. So, I can see that in the future, but it's not really what I'm striving for. I like that element of the person being un-posed. If I did work with someone in that situation I'd like that Annie Leibovitz method where she has her camera and she just talks with the person and as she's talking with them she snaps photos. That way she's trying to find them in unguarded and appealing moments.

Q - Being in Nashville, couldn't you find Country stars walking down the streets?

A - No. Not in Nashville. Downtown Nashville is for tourists and not for the natives. So, It's not like Honky Tonks on Lower Broadway where you're gonna walk in there and see some Country star. It's not where they hang out. Most of the stars, when they are home in Nashville, they really stick close to home because they're on the road so much that they don't necessarily want to go out. I've got to know Brad Paisley a little bit and he's very much a home person when he's home. Nicole Kidman lives here with Keith Urban and she's fairly public. People will see her in the grocery store or in a coffee house. I would never presume to take a photo of somebody like that without permission. They're in the public eye so much that, that to me feels like an intrusion.

Official Website: StacyWidelitz.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/stacywidelitz.com

Instagram: https:www.instagram.com/stacywidelitz/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swidelitz