Fogelberg's Living Legacy
The Living Legacy website collected tens of thousands of get well wishes to Dan Fogelberg during his illness and condolence messages to his family since his death. The get well wishes were given to him in a bound book that he read before he died. Dan Fogelberg's website - danfogelberg.com - includes a message from him thanking everyone, and educating men about prostate cancer. There is also a link to The Prostate Cancer Foundation. In February of 2005, Dan was in Colorado for a few weeks to supervise some ranch business and to do some work in the studio, while wife Jean stayed in Maine to oversee the final construction of their new house there. On the afternoon of the 14th, the florist delivered a dozen long-stemmed red roses and a CD labled "Sometimes A Song - for Jeanie - Valentine's Day 2005." "Sometimes A Song" is now available for digital download at iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and WalMart.com. 100% of proceeds from all digital sales will be donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. This is one of eleven previously unrecorded songs (nine originals) that will be released later this year on a CD Dan titled "Love In Time."
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Much Ado About Publishing
The Power of Words: A Tribute to Dan Fogelberg
One of Dan Fogelberg's hit singles was called "The Power of Gold."
After he died just a few months ago on December 16, 2007, I couldn't stop thinking about the power of words.
Exactly a year ago, I wrote my Much Ado About Publishing column that was published in May and June, 2007, as Part One of a two-part look back on the occasion of what I joked was the 25th anniversary of the day I married my typewriter and became a full-time writer. Part Two was published in July and August.
"An Anniversary with the King: Part One" told some of the lighter stories and Part Two some of the more serious.
Paying tribute to Larry King, who last year celebrated his 50th anniversary in broadcasting, I wrote in Part One about the journalistically satisfying, though hilarious 24-hour period back in the fall of 1987 when I interviewed both Larry King and Dan Fogelberg, my favorite contemporary singer/songwriter/musician.
When I interviewed them, Larry was 54, had a heart attack behind him and was about a week away from heart bypass surgery. Dan, on the other hand, was 36, in the proverbial prime of his life and as fit as the proverbial fiddle, guitar, or piano, for that matter.
If I'd been asked then who might not still be with us exactly 20 years down the road I would've guessed that it would've been Larry. Anybody would have thought the same.
This is what I was thinking on Monday night, December 17, 2007 when I watched CNN as Larry King, 74, and his guests paid tribute to Dan Fogelberg, who had died the day before at only 56 of prostate cancer.
I thought I was in a parallel universe. Or, perhaps, I'd gone down Alice's wonderland rabbit hole. Clearly, I was somewhere topsy-turvy where reality had taken a holiday.
Like so many, I had been shocked when I'd learned of Dan's death. I saw the CNN report on Sunday. My ears couldn't grasp what they'd just heard, and my eyes couldn't believe what they saw: the words Dan Fogelberg and dead in the same sentence on the screen.
I'd ghostwritten (pardon the pun) a book on grief recovery that had been published the previous December, exactly a year earlier, and intellectually and emotionally I understood the grieving process and the array of healthy coping mechanisms. I even knew the best one for me, the one I'd been using with great success for 33 years whenever anything upset me or made me sad.
There was just one problem: that foolproof method was listening to Dan Fogelberg albums.
Oops.
If I tried "Fogelberg Therapy" for this sad occasion, it wouldn't help, it would only make me feel worse. I was stuck.
And so I began thinking, as I said in the beginning, of the power of words.
I was going to write all about it in my January/February column. And I even made some notes just after Dan died. But couldn't write the column about that yet. I just wasn't ready. The grieving process was moving along pretty slowly without my "Fogelberg Therapy." I hadn't put on any of his music, and five months later I still haven't. Maybe I will tonight, after I finish writing this.
I wasn't ready to write about it for March/April, either, but I did take a pretty big step at the end of March. I called the Features Editor at The Courier-Journal, the daily newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, home of The Kentucky Derby, which has used Dan Fogelberg's song "Run for the Roses," written and recorded in 1980 especially for the Derby, as its theme ever since.
I pitched an article that would pay tribute to Dan Fogelberg on the occasion of the first Kentucky Derby since his death. The editor, who knows me well since I'd written many articles for the newspaper he used to work for, loved the idea.
The article, "Fogelberg's Classic is a Derby Favorite," was published in The Courier-Journal on April 25, 2008, a week before The Kentucky Derby.
Those of us who create, no matter what the medium, have been put in a terrible position: we have to contend with artistic industries run by bean-counters who care nothing about the power of words, music, art, photos, film, video, or dance, and everything about the power of marketing.
In my Courier-Journal article, I wrote:
"Writers speak for us when we are speechless. They put into words what we think, feel, and imagine.
"We read, watch, listen, and even sing along, grateful that they've read our minds and have expressed what we've been thinking and feeling even better then we could have ourselves.
"Even if we, too, are writers.
"Singer, songwriter, and musician Dan Fogelberg had that gift.
"The gift of showing us new ways of seeing and interpreting the world and ourselves. Of changing, enlightening and comforting us. Of opening our minds and then filling them.
"The gift of showing us new ways of seeing and interpreting the world and ourselves. Of changing, enlightening and comforting us. Of opening our minds and then filling them.
"His words and melodies had more power than he could've imagined. As the best do, he changed the lives of people he knew and even more people he never knew. It is the gift an artist simultaneously gives and receives."
In the article, John Asher, Churchill Downs vice president of communications, spoke about Dan's and "Run for the Roses" magic: "Dan Fogelberg had a direct, very personal connection with his fans, and they had an emotional investment in his music. The song is like that for the Derby. It's an emotional song about chasing a dream."
The power of his words and his music is obvious to anyone who listens to his albums or even to those who've only heard the more commercial Top 40 singles that came from those albums.
As I wrote in The Courier-Journal:
"From his first album, 1972's "Home Free," to his last, 2003's "Full Circle," which was released the year before his cancer diagnosis, Fogelberg wrote and performed across all genres, from melodic rock and tender ballads to country, bluegrass, jazz, and the classically inspired, richly, yet inventively orchestrated songs that became his trademark as a composer and a lyricist.
"Fogelberg sold out shows right up until 2004 when he had to stop performing because of his illness.
"After his diagnosis, The Living Legacy website (www.thelivinglegacy.net) collected thousands of get-well wishes. On his site (www.danfogelberg.com), in a 10-paragraph message, Fogelberg educated fans about prostate cancer, and he expressed his gratitude for the outpouring of concern.
"'It is truly overwhelming and humbling to realize how many lives my music has touched so deeply all these years,' he wrote."
During our 1987 interview, backstage after one of his concerts in a Philadelphia suburb, I told Dan that all of his songs probably saved everyone who listened at least $10,000 in therapy.
"Me, too!" he laughed. Then, he added, "That's the ultimate compliment to an artist -- that you've reached somebody and touched somebody, and they've related to it and said, 'Gosh, thanks!'"
If you write, no matter what its published form -- print, TV, film, music -- never doubt that your words, images, and melodies will have more power than you could've hoped for or imagined.
I'm going to go put on a Dan Fogelberg album now and have a good cry.
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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.
Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.