David Foster talks to Tony Harris

Tony Harris: When you look back on your career, and I am wondering, when was the last time when you took a moment and looked back on the career? And when you did that last, what'd you say? What words came to mind? 

David Foster: I know I was given a gift, a God-given gift. And I think I've used it well. I, like probably most successful people, Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, I wake up and I think I'm the greatest thing in the world. And Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, I think that I haven't accomplished anything and that I better get on it and there's so much more to do. And "Is that all there is? Is this is a joke? I'm a fraud." And then Sundays I don't think about it. And that's just the truth. And I think that's maybe the formula for success or the formula for continually pushing. I don't want to rest on my laurels. I've got lots more to do.

When you look back on all the music you've created over the years, starting in the '70s, do you think, "OK, I've done so much. Do I really need to grind away?" Are you still on the grind?

I am still incredibly on the grind. I mean, I came in last night to New York. I'm going back to LA today. I'm going to Europe on Friday to work on the [Andrea] Bocelli album at his house. And from there I go to Asia to do "Asia's Got Talent." I'll be there for two weeks. And then back working on J-Lo's Christmas record that'll come out this year. And, I mean, it's just what I love to do.

Why do you work that hard even now?

Life is short. I got so much that I want to do. There's so much more to do. I'm working on a Broadway play, "Betty Boop," that I'm here to have a meeting with. And, I mean, there's so much to do in this life, Tony. And I want to squeeze the last drop out of it, because you're dead for a long time. 

Let's do a bit of the biographical sketch. Did you really start playing at 5?

I did, which I don't think is unusual if you show talent. I had parents that were nurturing and not too pushy, and that was perfect for me.

I haven't heard you talk much about your parents. What kind of a start did they give you?

My father was an amateur piano player. And he sort of taught me a little bit. They allowed me to have classic lessons. We didn't have any money. But we weren't poor. It's that old story, right? And it was just right. I had a great upbringing. I had six sisters. And my mother was a homemaker, and my father worked hard. And I got a great work ethic from both of them. I had a perfect upbringing.

First song you learned on the piano. Now I'm taking you back.

First song probably was maybe Pat Boone's "Wonderful World up There." 

Did you form your first band, or did you join a band?

We formed it. I was the guy that was always 12, 13 years old, making money on the weekends, organizing the band, making the phone calls, calling the wedding person or getting the gig and knocking on the door. I would knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm here to talk about your daughter's wedding." And they'd go, "I thought you were the paper boy." You know, I was always like that.

But that's a big leap to creating your own music. When did you know, maybe at what age, at what moment, that you had that particular gift?

It was actually quite late. There was a schoolteacher in the fifth grade that kept giving me a B in music. And I said, "What do I need to do to get an A?" And she said, "You need to write your own music and perform it for the whole school." So I did that. And she still gave me a B. And I don't know why. Maybe to push me or whatever. A little whiplash in there. So it turned me off. And so I really didn't write start writing songs until I was maybe 23 or 24, which is very late, you know. 

What was your first song?

Well, the first hit that I wrote was a co-write with a friend of mine named David Page called "Got to Be Real." So that was 1978.

Cheryl Lynn?

Cheryl Lynn. Whoa. The man knows his stuff.

"What you find," right?

But so mid-'70s, I guess, I started writing seriously but didn't get on the hit train until '78.

What was that first moment like when you heard a song, the Cheryl Lynn song, when you heard your first hit on the radio?

Well, if you go back even further than that, to 1973, Skylark and the song "Wildflower" that was a hit, and I was the leader of the group. It's strange. You work on a song for four months in the studio, a studio like this. And you hear it 1,000 times. And then you sit in the car and you keep turning the dial until you can find it on the radio like it's going to sound any different. Right? You've heard this song 1,000 times, but there's something about it coming over the radio in your car.

I'm curious to know whether you're more surprised by the hits you've had over the years or by the misses. You're in this room and you're creating. You hear the final mix back, and you're like, "Wow, that's going to work." And maybe it doesn't. Or "Yes, that's really going to work," and it does.

Well, the real mystery is that you can do it and it works and you do it again and it works and you do it again and it works and then you do it again and it fails miserably. You've done exactly the same thing, put as much time and effort into it, and it fails. And nobody wants to hear it, and nobody wants to buy it. And it really confuses you. But of course, you keep going. Yes, but it's confusing.

Can we play the name game? Can we start with [Andrea] Bocelli?

Bocelli. Renaissance man, greatest singer I ever worked with, been working with him for 15 years. Love, love, love this man. He's beyond beyond. He's a lawyer. He sculpts. He plays every instrument. He rides horses, he swims, he dives, he windsurfs. He's a Renaissance man.

What is it in his vocal quality? What is it in his approach to music? What is it that makes him the greatest?

Bocelli rocks in both words. He is the most knowledgable classical person I know, other than maybe Lang Lang, my friend who's a piano player. And he walks in the pop world. He can sit at the piano and play a Beatles song. He can sit and play, pick up the guitar and play a Creedence Clearwater song. And he can sing any opera that you or I could even Google. It's incredible. He's phenomenal. I love him. That was not a short answer. Sorry. 

I don't want short answers. I want expansive David Foster. But I think of the other amazing voices that you've worked with and a couple of names —Whitney Houston.

Whitney. I knew you were going to say Whitney.

Did you? I was between Whitney and Celine [Dion].

Because they're great voices. I've said this before, but I think it's worthy of saying again. Celine was so amazing because whatever I asked her to do, she would do exactly what I wanted. I would come up with some lick in my stupid little sounds, and she would understand what I meant and deliver it to me. Whitney, I would do the same thing, she would never give me what I wanted, ever. She would give me usually something better than I asked, but many times it would be worse than I asked too. It was not what I wanted. But a lot of times it was better than I would ask for.

What a loss. What are your thoughts on Whitney Houston not being on this planet anymore singing? I mean, [she] left a treasure trove of great songs.

I feel so honored that I caught her at that moment. You could argue that "The Bodyguard" was not her best album. I don't know. But I would say "I Will Always Love You," that we did together, was the love song of the century. That was maybe the pinnacle of her. That's what she's most remembered for, I think.

A Dolly Parton song. You did the arrangement on that. 

I did. And then I wrote "I Have Nothing" for her, which was a fun thing for me to do. But she was amazing. She was a racehorse. She would just rip her jacket off, come in the studio and go. There's no vocal exercises, but she was a troubled girl. As I have read, she was troubled long before I met her. And that struggle stayed with her her whole life. I mean, if you'd given me a list of 100 singers that I'd worked with and said, "Which one's going to go?" she wouldn't be at the bottom of that list.

In "Hit Man," your terrific show, right?

It was my funeral while I was alive. 

You pay tribute to a hero of mine musically, Maurice White. So what's the importance of Earth, Wind and Fire?

It's kind of twofold. And I'll just give you a peek into my little soul. When I was in Skylark, the singer in Skylark, who's a great guy, just wasn't a fan of mine particularly. And he was a huge fan of Earth, Wind and Fire. So when [Skylark] broke up, I said, "I'm going to work with Earth, Wind and Fire. I'm going to learn about them, and I'm going to work with them. It's going to be my mission and my goal to get to Earth, Wind and Fire."

Why is that?

Well, when he turned me on to the group, I loved them. I mean, I just thought they were amazing. And I made it my goal. So he was kind of in my head all the time going, "You'll never work with Earth, Wind and Fire." It was one of those motivation, so I finally got there. Every single artist that you could name right now, from Usher to Prince to Bruno Mars ...

He's on that tree from Earth, Wind and Fire — Maurice, yes.

The Gap Band, they all came from Earth, Wind and Fire. And maybe you could say that that came from Sly [and the Family Stone] a little bit. But Maurice was fierce.

"After the Love Has Gone" — where did that come from in your soul, sir? What a song.

Got to tell the story really quickly. I'm sitting in Berry Gordy's office. I'm playing him an album that I want him to sign the artist. He didn't like the album. And so I BSed him, and I said, "Oh, this is not the whole album. I have more songs." And he went, "OK, really? Like what?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, like this." And I swear to you, I went over to the piano, and it fell out. I was totally lying. I had no more songs. I went over to the piano, and I went, "Oh, after the love has gone, what used to be right is wrong. Could love this lost be found," and the whole chorus fell out in real time.

And that's how it fell out of you.

Yes. And he was like, "What was that?" It was so much better than anything that was on the record, right? And he says, "That." And of course, Maurice White had the same reaction to that song too.

In your time in this business, what are the more significant changes that you've sort of charted in your own career?

The biggest change in our business probably was the CD. That was our television high-def moment. Television got their high-def moment, and everybody had to go buy a high-def TV. When the CD came along, everybody had to replace all their vinyl with CD. So that was our power moment. Late '80s, right? Music business was so robust, $40 billion a year business. Right now, it's an $8 billion business. So you can do the math on that. It's 8 percent to 12 percent a year dropped since the year 2000. I'd like to say that the music business is doing great, the record business is in trouble. Kids think it's their right to listen to music for free. But more importantly, Tony, kids don't want to own. They don't want to feel. They don't want to touch. They just want to play.

I want to talk about your charity work. In the past 27 years, the David Foster Foundation has assisted close to 1,000 families with children in need of major organ transplants. How did you come to this work?

It was a personal moment that happened to me. You know, personal story, about 30 years ago — and I was kind of late coming to the charity world — 30 years ago, I was 35. My friends Wayne Gretzky and Andre Agassi, they were 25 doing their charity work. And I'm going, "I better get on this train because you need to give back." 

And you're really blessed, right? 

Absolutely. It sounds corny, but it's your responsibility. And I had a personal encounter with a young girl who needed a liver transplant who didn't make it. All she wanted was to see her sister. So for the price of an airline ticket, I got her sister to come to Los Angeles, and that's how it started. And it's been such rewarding work. I mean, I've done probably 60, 70 concerts for my foundation. We're raising millions every time now. First year, we raised $49,000. It's just when you look at a family and you get a letter from a family that says, "You literally saved our marriage. You literally saved the siblings' lives." Because the siblings get forgot about. All the attention goes to sick child, understandably. So the siblings, they just get forgotten. So when you get a letter like that, "You saved our family," could there be anything better than that? That's better than any record. And in the early days, I knew the name of every child. I still could tell you Katie Luxton, Shannon Glass — heart, lung transplants when they were 7. I watched Katie Luxton get married. She was 7 years old when we helped her.

But now with so many families, I don't know all the families. But of course we have employees now. And I get fed the information. And it's a big job. It consumes probably a quarter of my life, which still means I'm working three-quarters on music. 

So what is the real joy for you? Maybe it's family? But what's the real joy for you?

The joy for me is when I find peace of mind. It's kind of a corny answer. I'm not that guy that, like, looks at the sunset and writes a song, I'm sorry to say.

Where does the motivation come from?

The motivation comes from it's a job. I know that's unromantic, but it's a job. And I know that when I get together with Michael Bublé, we're going to do something good. "OK, Mike, Tuesday, 10:00, let's get together, and something good's going to come out of it." It may not be a hit. But I love my family. I love my children. As you may have read, I've been married a few times, so it's a big blended family. And anybody out there that has a blended family knows what I'm talking about, that it's not that easy. But we're figuring it out. We're, like, this big, hot mess, you know, that works.

This interview has been edited and condensed.