Pop critics have never known quite what to do with soft rock, so they mostly ignore it, which is a shame, because soft rock is where a great many people actually fell in love. “It Might Be You” is a perfect specimen: a gentle ballad built around a verb that refuses to commit. Written for a film about a man in a dress, sung by the guy who had earlier supplied the theme for Animal House, nominated for an Oscar, and then quietly folded into the soundtrack of ordinary life, it sounds at first like background music. Listen again. It is a song about the edge of recognition, that thin moment before you are sure, and it has more nerve than its smooth surface suggests.
Written for Tootsie
The movie was Tootsie, released in 1982 and directed by Sydney Pollack. Dustin Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an impossible, unemployable actor who disguises himself as a woman named Dorothy Michaels to land a part on a soap opera, and then falls for a colleague played by Jessica Lange. On the surface the film is farce. Underneath it is something kinder, a comedy about what a man might learn if he were forced to listen. The song that plays through it was not written by its singer. Dave Grusin, a jazz pianist and one of Hollywood’s most dependable composers, wrote the music, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the husband-and-wife team behind the words to “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind,” wrote the lyric.
Stephen Bishop was a singer-songwriter with an easy tenor and a reputation for wry, tender songs, and he was hired the way singers often are for films, because the producers knew what he sounded like. He has been frank in interviews that it was an assignment, a job rather than a vision. That candor is worth remembering. Some of the best things in popular music were made by professionals doing their work well, with no sense that anyone would remember. The record came out at the end of 1982, climbed to number 25 on the Hot 100, and went to the top of the Adult Contemporary chart in the spring of 1983. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song and lost to “Up Where We Belong,” from An Officer and a Gentleman. Bishop sang it on the Oscar broadcast anyway.
The Grammar of Maybe
Look at the title. Four small words, and the verb in the middle is a modal: might. Popular songs love certainty. They announce that you are the one, the only, the reason, the forever. This one will not make the announcement. It says the person might be the one, and then it builds an entire emotional structure on that single, shy word. The lyric describes someone who has spent a long time waiting and watching for signs, and who suddenly finds himself standing in front of the person who may be the answer, afraid to say so too loudly in case saying it breaks the spell.
That hesitation is the song’s whole drama, and it is surprisingly rare. In a year when the radio was full of declarations, of love, of rage, of victory, here was a record made out of tact. The melody has the same tentative quality, lifting at the ends of its phrases the way a voice does when it asks a question and wants the answer to be yes. Nobody sings “I love you” in this song. What they sing is the moment just before, the place where hope is still a private matter and you are not yet sure whether to speak. Most people live in that moment far more often than they live in the big declarative one. The Bergmans understood it, and they built a melody and a lyric for it.
A Love Song for a Man in Disguise
The film adds a layer the song never mentions. Michael is hiding. He can get close to the woman he has fallen for only by being someone else, which means the sweetest feeling in the movie, the possibility of a real connection, is shadowed by a lie he cannot take back. Heard against that, the title turns sad and funny at once. He might be the one for her, and she might be the one for him, and neither can say it, because one of them is wearing a wig. A man who cannot tell the truth gets the most honest song in the picture.
But you do not need the movie to feel what the song is saying, and that may be why it escaped the film. Every one of us has stood in front of someone and wondered whether this was the real thing, whether the feeling was true or merely hopeful, whether to say something now or wait. The song gives that uncertainty a warm room to sit in. It does not rush the listener toward an answer. It says, in effect, that not knowing is a perfectly decent place to stand, and that the best things sometimes begin there, without a guarantee, on the strength of nothing but a feeling and the nerve to follow it.
The Case for Soft Rock
The sound is pure early-eighties Los Angeles. Grusin plays electric and acoustic piano, guitars shimmer from a crew of first-rate studio players, the bass walks softly, and a synthesizer glows in the background like a lamp left on in the next room. Every note is polished and placed. It sounds like a department-store window at Christmas, warm light behind glass. Critics of the time heard a lack of danger, and in the age of punk’s aftermath, new wave, and the first fierce blast of MTV, that was a fair complaint. But smoothness can be a form of tact. Bishop’s voice does not oversell anything. It sounds like a man trying not to frighten someone off.
Notice, too, who was listening. The song peaked in the middle of the pop chart but sat at the top of the chart for grown-ups, the people who had stopped buying singles for the drums and started buying them for the company. Adult Contemporary radio was not hip, and it did not pretend to be, but it was where a great many people went to feel something quietly, in the car, between errands. A song like this does not change a genre or start a movement. It does something more modest and perhaps more lasting. It keeps people company while they decide whether to be brave.
The Generosity of Maybe
So what does “It Might Be You” mean? It means that hope is a form of attention. To say “might” is to keep your eyes open, to refuse to close the question too early, to give another person room to turn out to be real. Stephen Bishop sang it with a lightness that hides how much courage it takes, and the Bergmans gave it a grammar that still sounds like honesty. Four decades later the song has outlasted the film’s jokes and most of the decade’s louder hits. It stays because its promise is small and true. Nobody knows who the right person will be. But someone, somewhere, might be.