Grunge columnist Richard Milner wrote a fantastic piece celebrating “The Way We Were,” with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Here are some highlights:

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By numbers alone, Barbra Streisand is one of the most successful artists of all time… Arguably at the height of her powers in the 1970s, 1973 saw Streisand grace the big screen in a film that bore a 1974-released song of the same name, “The Way We Were.” The song became Streisand’s first No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit. It landed on the chart in November of 1973 and climbed up to No. 1, where it stayed for three weeks starting on February 2. The song spent a total of 23 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100…

“The Way We Were” wasn’t a mere soundtrack song; it was written to encapsulate its 1973 movie in its entirety. As Beacon Senior News quotes songwriter Marvin Hamlisch, “I wanted to convey all the sorrow, despondency, and pain of their relationship, capturing its star-crossed nature”…

As a song, you couldn’t get a more gentle, easy-listening ballad than “The Way We Were.” It’s a low-tempo, piano-and-stringed-filled, orchestrally backed track that highlights Streisand’s voice, has an unintrusive, subtly pulsing bass line, some clean electric guitar work, and so forth. It and its core melodic line captured the ears and hearts of the music-listening public in the mid-70s…

But even though “The Way We Were” is a very emotional song, Hamlisch didn’t want to go overboard with its sentimentality. He was “determined not to write something drippingly sentimental,” per Beacon Senior News, but also built the song specifically around Streisand’s vocal strengths to “let her soar!”

Hamlisch must have hit the right balance between authenticity and schmaltz, because the general public loved the song.

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Read the full article here.