Anthony Marinelli Music: An Inside Look with Tom Bähler — We Are the World

One of the pleasures of internet radio is being able to wander a little deeper into the music — beyond the finished recording and into the stories of the people who actually made it.

Anthony Marinelli Music is particularly wonderful for that.

Anthony Marinelli is a composer, arranger, keyboardist and synthesizer programmer whose career puts him right in the middle of an extraordinary period in recording history. He worked with artists including Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, James Brown, Supertramp and many others, and was part of the circle of musicians working with producer Quincy Jones. His credits include work on Thriller, as well as more than 90 film scores and extensive work in television, advertising and sound design.

But what makes the Anthony Marinelli Music project especially interesting isn’t simply Marinelli’s résumé. It’s his willingness to sit down with the musicians, arrangers, engineers and other people who were actually in the room and allow them to tell the stories behind recordings that have become part of our collective musical memory.

One of those people is Tom Bähler.

Bähler was a longtime associate of Quincy Jones, a songwriter, arranger and producer who worked closely with Michael Jackson and others. He wrote Jackson’s She’s Out of My Life, but his role in We Are the World is particularly fascinating: Bähler was the vocal arranger charged with deciding which of that astonishing collection of singers should sing each individual line.

Think about that assignment for a moment.

Stevie Wonder. Bruce Springsteen. Tina Turner. Ray Charles. Bob Dylan. Cyndi Lauper. Diana Ross. Billy Joel. Willie Nelson. Michael Jackson. Lionel Richie — dozens of some of the most recognizable voices in popular music, gathered in one room.

And somebody had to figure out where every one of those voices belonged.

Bähler listened to the singers and worked out how their individual ranges, colours and personalities could carry the song from one voice to another. The resulting sequence — the sometimes startling transitions from one unmistakable voice to the next — is part of what gives We Are the World its extraordinary emotional architecture.

That’s what makes Anthony Marinelli’s conversation with him so valuable. This isn’t somebody reconstructing the story forty years later from books and documentaries. Marinelli and Bähler inhabited that musical world themselves. In fact, Marinelli has described reconnecting with his “old friend” Bähler and recording a series of conversations about working with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, including Bähler’s arranging of We Are the World.

So when Tom Bähler talks about that night, we’re hearing oral history from one of the people who helped make the record what it became.

And perhaps that is one of the loveliest things about having these interviews available now. The records remain, of course. But so do the voices of the people behind them — telling us what happened, what they were thinking, what went wrong, what worked, and what it actually felt like to be there.

As Bähler himself later remembered the We Are the World session, it was an extraordinarily special night — one he remembered above all for the atmosphere of love in the room.

That’s the kind of musical history we’re very happy to stumble across and share on Airstreaming Radio.

Keep on Listening.

Anthony Marinelli Music