Working With Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton

In the late 80s early 90s, Michael Bolton was very hot on the charts enjoying some serious success. At the time I was working quite a bit with Walter Afanasieff and was asked to put together some singers for an upcoming Michael Bolton Project.

I called Dorian Holley, Jim Gilstrap and we worked with the female singers that tour with Michael for his live performances. I was the vocal contractor for the upcoming project and a few days before the session I received a call from Michael's manaager letting me know that they were not going to pay this exorbitant price for singers. I mentioned to him that I was going to fill out the AFTRA contract based on how many songs we would sing on, and how many tracks per song we would sing on.

"The One Thing"

A.F.T.R.A stands for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. They have a set scale for recording, so I let Michael's manager know that if he wanted any changes he was going to have to take things up with Walter who was the producer of the session.

The album we recorded was called "The One Thing" It contained the hit "Said I Loved You...But I Lied", which reached #6 in the US, but it didn't match the sales of his previous two albums. This project did hit 3 times platinum in the US and a total of 6 million worldwide.

During the session Michael came in teasing me about the money, his first comment to me was "boy I'm going to have to melt down some of my grammy's to help pay for this session because we have Phillip Ingram on the session." That was our first time meeting each other and the first words that came out of his mouth, so my comment was "well at least you have some grammy's to melt down"...The female singers that toured with Michael laughed because I was holding my own.

Michael Bolton (Today)

Michaell tried a couple of more times to rib me, but I don't think he knew that I grew up in Akron, Ohio and we did this type of stuff in our sleep.

After the session Michael came over and mentioned how much he enjoyed my singing and also mentioned that if I ever needed a song, he would love to write for me. I thanked him.

We performed quite a few songs on the record, that was the first and the last time that I worked with Michael Bolton. Even with Michael trying to 'rib me' I still had fun. One of my motto's is 'don't let other people's issues become your issues'. I showed up to do what I do and that is SING, and that's what we did.

Below is one of the song's we sang background on, it's called"Never Get Enough Of Your Love" - Written by Diane Warren, Walter Afanasieff and Michael Bolton.

Until next time - Phillip