Rita Wilson — the singer/songwriter who hosts Liner Notes: Songwriters, Stories and Music at the Granada Theatre on Saturday, March 11 — knows a thing or two about reciting someone else’s words. With several decades’ worth of acting on her résumé, and with an album of covers launching her music career (2012’s AM/FM), she’s honed the art of channeling her emotions through another’s words.
With last year’s self-titled album of original works, she now has words of her own to sing, and it is these words she will share in an intimate conversation with several other songwriters: Billy Steinberg, Richard Marx, and MoZella. While you may not recognize their names, you almost certainly have heard the songs they wrote. Steinberg is the co-writer of five number one singles on Billboard's "Hot 100" chart, including "Like a Virgin" (Madonna), "True Colors" (Cyndi Lauper), and "So Emotional" (Whitney Houston); Marx is a 30-million-album-selling adult-contemporary artist and author of hits such as "Hold On to the Nights" and "Don't Mean Nothing"; and MoZella is the co-writer of several chart-topping hits including “Wrecking Ball” (Miley Cyrus) and One Direction’s “Perfect,” plus co-writing credits on more than half of Madonna’s album Rebel Heart. With pedigrees like these, it will be a night of rich stories, ones you may have had no idea about as you sang these songs in your car, shower, or club.
Wilson started the Liner Notes series in 2015 as an evening of songwriters performing and sharing the inspiration behind their songs, and it was this disconnect between listener and songwriter that motivated her in the first place. “It occurred to me that, in our days now, you really feel like you know so much about somebody’s hair dresser or stylist, but you don’t know the names of the people who wrote the songs that are the soundtrack to your lives,” she said. She recalls growing up poring over liner notes on vinyl sleeves, learning the names of every person involved, and she feels “we’ve lost that a little bit, and I thought it would be really cool to start celebrating songwriters and the stories behind their songs.”