Phillip, What's Your Latest Project?: CHRONICLES OF THE PAST

In the mid 90s I sang on a few films that had Wedding themes. I've talked about 2 of the films on this BLOG in the past, "The Wedding Singer", and "My Best Friends Wedding". The Wedding theme films though all started with this one, "Father Of The Bride II". All of the films came out relatively close to each other in terms of years, 1995 - Father of the Bride II, 1997 - My Best Friends Wedding, 1998 - The Wedding Singer.

Randy Waldman, a great pianist and good friend called me to sing on a demo for an upcoming film called Father of the Bride II. Already, the original, Father Of The Bride starring Steve Martin had been a huge success. The composer of this film, Father of the Bride II, was Alan Silvestri. I had heard of Alan, but this was the first time I got to meet him and work with him. Alan wrote a beautiful piece called 'Remembering Annie'. We did the demo at Randy's house, no lyrics just me humming the melody and singing some background parts.

When I went in to do the actual song for the film the orchestra had just finished and boy what a beautiful piece Alan and Randy had come up with. The song is called 'Remembering Annie' because in the film there's a scene where he's selling the house and Annie, played by Kimberly Williams, says that he, the father, forgot something and she throws him a basketball. When he grabs the basketball he looks at Annie and they show her as a little girl slowly growing up, and that's the scene where the song I sang is played.

I remember going into the studio and since the orchestra had just finished there were quite a few people still in the studio. Nancy Meyers was the director of this film and she mentioned to me that this was a very important scene in the film. One of the things that I learned over the years is to always do my best. I figured it was an important scene in the film but I didn't want to make that my focus. So my focus was to do my best, which is my focus when I'm writing, singing, producing, performing, whatever. I didn't want to become all tense because this was an important scene in the film. I responded to Nancy something like 'well if this doesn't work I'm sure there's some other singers out there that can do the job' or something like that. Anyway my response made everyone laugh, and I've also learned that laughter relaxes people. So the laughter allowed me to do what I do best without any extra pressure on whether or not this was an important scene. When you're relaxed you do your best work, when you're tense your performance can suffer, so I do my best to stay relaxed in 'any setting'.

As always though, I enjoyed working on this film and this came out to be one of the Steve Martin comedy classics of all time and I'm glad that I got a chance to be a small part.

Watch the trailer of 'Father Of The Bride II'