ENTER TORONTO singer-songwriter Dan Hill’s modest but artfully decorated home, and at first, there’s little to differentiate it from any other cozy abode.
Hill warmly greets a visitor and leads the way downstairs to his basement studio, where colourful pictures drawn by his son as a youngster line the stairwell, displayed as proudly as any elaborate artwork.
But few homes include a fully appointed subterranean recording studio, complete with framed gold and platinum records dotting the walls — awards for Hill’s hit singles over the years, including “Sometimes When We Touch,” the treacly 1977 ballad music fans all over the world have come to know him for.
But the seeds for Hill’s long, successful career as a singer and songwriter of introspective, emotive tunes were first sown while he was growing up in the Bayview–York Mills neighbourhood. As a preteen in the early 1960s, Hill lived in the area with his family, memories he famously chronicled last year in his best-selling memoir I Am My Father’s Son.
The memoir traces Hill’s coming of age in a mixed-race family and his complex relationship with his father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The few brief yet formative years in the area saw him begin to pursue his twin passions for running and music at a surprisingly early age, well before he even hit high school.
"Sixties Child", from Dan Hill’s new release, "Intimate". In stores March 9th. For further information www.danhill.com.
Spurred by the folksinger boom of the era, Hill and his peers — including renowned songwriter Murray McLachlan, bassist Dennis Pendrith, and late author Paul Quarrington (Hill’s lifelong close friend) — were inspired to write and perform their own songs, jockeying for gigs at a plethora of venues in the Bayview area.
“It was great for performers in the Toronto area because, back then, high schools had a budget to hire entertainers,” Hill, now 55, says.
“So a lot of people played York Mills Collegiate and other schools in the area, in addition to all the little churches and coffee houses where you could perform. And it was at a time when the singer-songwriter thing was really hitting hard, with Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell, so people didn’t want you up there just being a lounge singer — they wanted to hear your own songs.
“So it was an absolutely wonderful time, and Bayview was right there,” he continues. “People think of the area as this kind of sterile place, but it was actually very fertile for music, incredibly fertile. There was a lot of really brilliant talent my age. We all kind of found each other in this Don Mills–Bayview area.”
The neighbourhood’s healthy competition and convivial environment proved fruitful for the young Hill, who developed a unique perspective on the area as a performer by night and runner by day. He trained for track competitions by sprinting long distances across Bayview’s wellmanicured residential areas and less well-trodden paths.
“One of my routes would be from my family’s house, right up to Bayview and York Mills and back down again,” says Hill, a diabetic who continues to run every day to stay fit. “And we’d run out to the Donalda golf course, just east of Bayview. The course was great to run on, because the grass was so nice and soft — the rich, elitist golfers would be screaming at us, but they could never catch us.” He laughs. “So between the running and performing, I was all over Bayview.”
These days, Hill resides in the east end with his wife, lawyer Beverly Chapin-Hill, and son David, 21 (Hill quips that he and his wife are essentially empty nesters these days).
But his early beginnings are never far from his mind, despite an enviable 30- year career that has garnered him five Juno Awards, a Grammy Award (for production work on Celine Dion’s breakthrough 1997 album Falling into You) and several top 10 hits. These days, in fact, he’s as acclaimed for his own material as for writing hits for others, penning chart-toppers for a wide cross-section of pop and country stars, including Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Reba McEntire and others.
Slight, with a salt-and-pepper beard and sporting a casual plaid shirt, Hill exudes a quiet confidence that belies his sometimes shaky upbringing — while he and his siblings (his brother is acclaimed novelist Lawrence Hill, and sister Karen is a noted poet) were encouraged to follow their dreams, Hill’s father, Daniel Grafton Hill III, made it clear that he didn’t think his son would go far in pursuing the often fickle world of pop music.
“What we do in childhood really affects us as adults,” Hill points out. “In some way, I guess I was always writing songs to get my father to listen. The pressure to succeed was overwhelming, but there was still a feeling of not fitting in — for one thing, there were not a lot of mixedrace families in the area at the time, so growing up in that environment wasn’t easy.
“But we all have our choices of how to take these cruelties or volleys of ignorance that we absorb,” he notes. “We can be bitter or strike back in the best way we can, which is based on our abilities.”
After his father died of complications from diabetes in 2003, Hill went through a prolonged period of intense mourning that culminated in him writing I Am My Father’s Son: A Memoir of Love and Forgiveness, a searingly personal glimpse into the often rocky yet ultimately loving relationship with his driven, demanding father.When the book was released last year, critics and readers alike were taken by Hill’s starkly honest yet wryly humorous prose.
It was in writing the memoir that Hill was inspired to return to making his own albums after a decade-long hiatus — this month sees the release of Intimate, a collection of new tracks and songs written for other artists over the years. Collaborating with his longtime producers, Hill recorded the album in his home studio over two months last spring after being moved by the emotional response to the book, which was reissued in paperback last month.
“I was missing music,” he admits, smiling. “The book was really good for me, and writing songs for other people is a great challenge, but I was ready to sing some of those songs myself.”
While an army of songwriters churns out material to feed the pop machine these days, few have managed to craft quite as many hits as Hill, who’s happy to work behind the scenes, eschewing the kind of celebrity he enjoyed for a time in the ’70s. So what’s the secret to a hit song? The same thing that drove his book, Hill says: emotional honesty.
“Every time I write a song, I try to make it the best I can, whether it’s for my record or someone else’s,”says Hill, who’s currently much sought-after by the Nashville set as his narrative songwriting style lends itself well to the country music sound.
“I stay on top of what’s new in music not to try to mimic what’s out there, but because I love it,” he continues. “You can’t just stay still — you have to be engaged with life. When I’m running or performing, my heart is like a jackhammer, bursting out of my chest. I want to live my life. I want to truly feel it. I learned that from Paul [Quarrington] — to squeeze the most out of life.”