Harry Nilsson

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Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994[2]), usually credited as Nilsson, was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s.

His work is characterized by pioneering overdub experiments, returns to the Great American Songbook, and fusions of Caribbean sounds. A tenor with a three-and-a-half octave range, Nilsson was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists of his era to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours.

Born in Brooklyn, Nilsson fled to Los Angeles as a teenager and landed a job as a computer programmer at a bank. It was there that he cultivated an interest in musical composition and close-harmony singing, and was successful in having some of his songs recorded by various artists such as the Monkees, and later, Three Dog Night, who had a No. 5 hit with his song "One". In 1967, he debuted on RCA Victor with the LP Pandemonium Shadow Show, followed with a variety of releases that include a collaboration with Randy Newman (Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970) and the original children's story The Point! (1971).

After a brief period of widely publicized, alcohol-fueled antics with John Lennon—the two collaborating in 1974 for the album Pussy Cats—Nilsson left RCA, and his record output subsequently diminished. In response to Lennon's 1980 death by shooting, he took a hiatus from the music industry to campaign for gun control. For the rest of his life, he recorded only on sporadic occasions. In 1994, Nilsson died of a heart attack while in the midst of recording new material for a since-unreleased comeback album.

In 2015, Nilsson was voted No. 62 in Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, where he was described as "a pioneer of the Los Angeles studio sound, a crucial bridge between the baroque psychedelic pop of the late Sixties and the more personal singer-songwriter era of the Seventies".

The RIAA have certified Nilsson's albums Nilsson Schmilsson (1971) and Son of Schmilsson (1972) as gold records, indicating over 500,000 units sold each. His singles to reach the US top 10 were "Everybody's Talkin'" (1969), "Without You" (1971), and "Coconut" (1972).  Nilsson's honors include Grammy Awards for two of his recordings; Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male in 1970 for "Everybody's Talkin'", a prominent song in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male in 1973 for "Without You".

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE

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Nilsson was searching for a potentially successful song when Rick Jarrard played the track for him, and he decided to release it on his 1968 album Aerial Ballet  When released as a single in July 1968, it only managed to reach No. 113 on the Billboard Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart. After the song was featured as the theme song in the film Midnight Cowboy in 1969, the song was re-released as a single and became a hit, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and No. 2 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart.

When Derek Taylor recommended Nilsson for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack to director John Schlesinger, Schlesinger selected "Everybody's Talkin'",  preferring the cover to the song Nilsson proposed, "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City".

The song was used as the theme song for the movie and became closely identified with it;  Nilsson's cover is also known as "Everybody's Talkin' (Theme from Midnight Cowboy)". William J. Mann, in his biography of Schlesinger, noted that "one cannot imagine Midnight Cowboy now without 'Everybody's Talkin'".