Thanks to one of my girlfriend’s little skits, I woke up today with Sometimes When We Touch in my head. I realized this while I was brushing my teeth, like an intrusive thought.
Dan Hill is a bit of a curiosity.
I used to know a guy who had the same name. As you can well imagine, he was not entertained by people singing that goddamned song to him all the time. As one of those people who not only loves digging through record-store bins for albums — but also thrift store shelves, yard sale milk crates, and occasionally… garbage, I can tell you there are a great many orphaned Dan Hill records. He’s one of those artists who made and sold a lot of records, but for some reason, the people who bought those records don’t keep them the way they do Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and KISS. My suspicion has always been that people ended up with a Dan Hill record due to the popularity of Sometimes When We Touch — but there’s only so many times you can listen to it. I mean, seriously — it’s a pretty earnest love song. There are “till I die” references, crying, dying, fear and hiding. It’s not exactly You’re The One That I Want, or Love Will Keep Us Together.
But more than that, let me ask you this: Have you ever actually put on a Dan Hill record? I haven’t. To me, Dan Hill is music you come into contact with through no fault of your own. It’s on, but it wasn’t you who put it on. It’s the kind of record you ended up with due to a problematic record club membership, or it was gifted to you by someone who just grabbed an album off the rack by an artist whose name they’ve heard. Maybe it actually was you who bought it, but for strategic romantic reasons. Who knows?
I can tell you this: A lot of people bought it. That song was the big hit from Dan’s third album Longer Fuse, which came out in late 1977. It’s basically a 1978 album. That year in Canada, 300K copies were sold and a million more sold in the U.S. Of all the albums Canadians bought that year, Longer Fuse was the seventh most popular. Above it on the list were the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks, Some Girls by The Rolling Stones, Billy Joel’s The Stranger, Slowhand by Eric Clapton and Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf.
Longer Fuse was the top-selling Canadian album of 1978. But after digging through used records like a madman for many years, I can’t help but wonder if any of the people who bought it still have it. Seems like they’ve all been returned to the wild. There are a lot of albums like this — castoffs, deadheads and orphans. Here are a few I see all the time:
Valotte | Julian Lennon
Angel Clare | Art Garfunkel
Second Contribution | Shawn Phillips
Anything by Bill Cosby
Worlds Away | Pablo Cruise
Guilty | Barbra Streisand
Double Fantasy | John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Sleeper Catcher | Little River Band
Freeze-Frame | J. Geils Band
…and at least one of these Elton John bombs: A Single Man, 21 at 33, The Fox, Victim Of Love or Leather Jackets.
In fairness to Dan Hill, I decided he just has to be more than this one song, this one style. I was absolutely, entirely unfamiliar with his catalog, so I decided to dive in and see if Danny has any hidden, killer deep cuts. Any songs with swears? There’s got to be at least one song I can add to my Spotify favourites playlist.
One of the first things I noticed: The bass player on Longer Fuse was Rick Homme, the son of the goddamned Friendly Giant, the late Bob Homme. Still, that’s not exactly Josh Homme, is it? Rick died in 2011, 11 years after his dad.
Hill has 14 albums. His self-titled debut came out in 1975 and he put out an album nearly every year through 1983, skipping only 1979 and 1981. He put out another self-titled album in 1987 and then kept going at a rate of an album every two years until 1996. There was nothing after that until 2010, followed by his most recent record, 2021’s On The Other Side Of Here. He has three compilations all called The Best of Dan Hill, and a fourth called The Dan Hill Collection. He has no live albums.
It seems one reason his production slowed in the ’90s is he started selling lyrics to other artists — some pretty big names, too. Reba McEntire, Britney Spears, Celine Dion and Backstreet Boys have all recorded Hill-penned lyrics.
Hill is not just Dan Hill Jr., he’s Dan Hill IV. He was born in Toronto in 1954 to an activist mom and well-known Canadian black history specialist / social scientist / public servant, Daniel G. Hill. Here we go — panning for gold in Dan Hill’s catalog…
I spent two hours and came away with this: His best song was his big hit, and that’s one of just three songs of his that I know. The other ones are Can’t We Try (his 1987 duet with Vonda Shepard) and You Make Me Want To Be, a single which was the opening track on his debut album.
Dan’s music doesn’t vary that much. It’s pretty well all ballads. Super-syrupy ballads. Last year I tried to do the same exercise with Jimmy Swaggart’s albums. You know, looking for some hidden great songs. I found a handful. More than I found in Dan Hill’s catalog — and quite a bit more varied in style, as well. Sure they’re all about Jesus, but at least there were rockers and waltzes and country numbers. Dan’s got a bunch of incredibly tender folky ballads from the late ’70s, and then a plastic avalanche of extremely dated synth ballads from the ’80s and ’90s. His 2021 record fits right in. I will say this: He has a lovely voice, which remains intact as he approaches his 71st birthday. I just can’t imagine anyone doing 14 albums in exactly the same style.
Bet the fella has done alright for himself, though. Not only does he have a couple of No. 1 hits, but all but five of his 28 singles charted somewhere. Longer Fuse reached No. 7 on the Australian album charts in 1978, No. 2 in Canada, and No. 21 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Looking specifically at Sometimes When We Touch — which he wrote when he was 19 years old — it’s up there with Yesterday in terms of how many cover versions it has spawned. Probably hundreds.
I went through them, so you didn’t have to. Here’s a solid sampling:
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
