Harry Chapin Archives

In the Spotlight: Mandy Patinkin

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Apr 262019

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

You know Mandy Patinkin best for playing the part of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, or you may know him best as a regular on Showtime’s Homeland. If you fall in either of those camps, you may not know that Patinkin is a living legend in the musical theater world. He created the role of Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George, and he won a Best Actor Tony for his performance as Che in Evita. He’s performed on Broadway over the course of five decades. And, as you can imagine, he knows his way around a cover song.

Covering the Hits: “Cat’s in the Cradle” (Harry Chapin)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 2:00 pm 1 Response »

Apr 192019

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty-odd years.

No number one hit says “massive guilt trip” like Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” It’s become a shorthand reference to neglectful father-son parenting, featured in popular culture from Simpsons to Shrek the Third, and Stevie Wonder only wishes he prompted as many phone calls just to say “I love you.”

It started off as a poem by Sandy Chapin, Harry’s wife, inspired by the relationship between her first husband and his father. “He came home and I showed him the poem, and he sort of brushed it aside,” she said. But a year later Harry had become a father, and found himself living the life his wife had written about; he wrote music and a chorus, and David Geffen selected it to be a single. “You can’t do that; it’s ridiculous,” Sandy told him. “That song will only appeal to 45-year-old men, and they don’t buy records.” Harry himself wanted to re-record the song, saying “It’s terrible, just terrible. It’s much too fast a tempo.” Both of them were proved very wrong, as the song went to #1 in December 1974.