Cynthia Weil

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Cynthia Weil was an American lyricist, born in 1940 in New York. She grew up in Manhattan in a Jewish family and trained as an actress and dancer. It soon became clear that she was good at writing songs. Around 1960 she joined Don Kirshner's music publisher Aldon Music, and so became one of the writers associated with the Brill Building in New York. There she met the composer Barry Mann, whom she married in 1961.

Music and breakthrough

Mann usually wrote the music and Weil the lyrics. Together they created great ballads such as On Broadway and You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', and hard-hitting rock songs such as Kicks and We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Weil liked to write lyrics with substance. Uptown is about the gap between rich and poor, On Broadway about how hard it is to make it in the big city, and Only in America was about segregation and racism. We Gotta Get Out of This Place became an anthem for soldiers in Vietnam and for young people who wanted to get away.

Influence

Weil and Mann thus belonged to the songwriting duos who defined the sound of pop in the 1960s, alongside Carole King and Gerry Goffin, among others. Later they also wrote for films, and for Somewhere Out There Weil received two Grammys. The couple were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Weil died in 2023.

Listening

In School of Rock

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