Dan Hill

Daniel Grafton Hill IV (born 3 June 1954) is a Canadian pop singer and songwriter. He had two major international hits with his songs "Sometimes When We Touch" and "Can't We Try", a duet with Vonda Shepard, as well as a number of other charting singles in Canada and the United States. He also established himself as a songwriter who produced hit songs for artists such as George Benson and Celine Dion.

Hill was born in Toronto, the son of social scientist and public servant Daniel G. Hill and social activist Donna Mae Hill (née Bender, 1928–2018), and older brother of the author Lawrence Hill and the late novelist Karen Hill. His musical talent was apparent from a young age, and he received his first guitar shortly after his tenth birthday. While in high school, he was singing and performing at concerts and coffee houses. At one point Hill was working for the Ontario provincial government sorting mail and delivering supplies, while performing at the Riverboat at night. Before finishing high school, he recorded a demo tape with the assistance of his boyhood friend Matt McCauley, later a well-known composer and arranger. In 1972, he signed a contract with RCA, who released a single the following year but did little to advance his career.

Continuing to record with McCauley, he succeeded in breaking the RCA contract and signing with GRT Records, an independent Canadian label. In 1975, they released his first Canadian hit single,"You Make Me Want to Be," which was followed by his first album, Dan Hill.

In 1977, Hill recorded the ballad "Sometimes When We Touch". He also wrote the lyrics and was assisted in the music by Barry Mann for the album from the same year, Longer Fuse, and it was released as a single. It was Hill's biggest hit, peaking at No. 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Canadian RPM Singles chart, and leading to Hill's appearances on The Merv Griffin Show and The Mike Douglas Show. Tina Turner covered the song in 1978 on her album Rough. At one point, Hill regarded the song as an "albatross" that was limiting his career as a singer; no matter what he recorded, if the song happened to be a ballad, people thought it sounded like "Sometimes When We Touch". Years later, he came to appreciate that "Sometimes When We Touch" had opened doors to "every possible facet of the music business" and enabled him to develop into a successful songwriter and producer.

Another one of his hit songs was "It's a Long Road", which he recorded for the 1982 action movie First Blood. In 1985, he was one of the many Canadian performers to appear on the benefit single "Tears Are Not Enough" by Northern Lights. Although he had many hits in his native Canada, further singles did not fare as well in the United States, where, after "Let the Song Last Forever" in late 1978, he went almost a decade without cracking any of Billboard's singles charts.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.