The Thanksgiving special included inner-city kids from a local community organization. I saw the kids backstage, brimming with both promise and fear, and in them, I saw me. I would sing this song for them too. The concert opened with my latest hit, “Emotions”—upbeat and embellished with lots of my signature super-high notes. As I was singing “Emotions,” and through the several stops and retakes required (singing live for TV recording is tedious work), I was able to really look at the people in the crowd. This was Schenectady, and these were real folks—not paid seat fillers or trendily dressed extras but authentic, mostly young people with that unmistakable hunger and adoration in their eyes. I saw them for who they were, and they were me. I closed my eyes and said a prayer. As the first few chords of the piano intro played, I started to hum from my heart. When I opened my mouth, “Hero” was released into the world.
Some of us need to be rescued, but everyone wants to be seen. I sang “Hero” directly to the faces I could see from the stage. I saw tears well up in their eyes and hope rise up in their spirits. Whatever cynicism I had about that song was gone after that night. But Tommy, too, had noticed the size of its impact.
Later that year, on December 10, 1993, when I performed “Hero” at Madison Square Garden, I announced that all stateside sales proceeds would be donated to the families of victims of the Long Island Railroad shooting, which had happened three days prior. On a train—a route I’d ridden before—a man pulled out a 9-mm pistol and opened fire, killing six people and wounding nineteen. Three brave men, Kevin Blum, Mark McEntee, and Michael O’Connor, subdued him, thus preventing more slaughter. They were heroes, and so I dedicated “Hero” to them that night. Just ten days after the September 11 attacks, I sang the song as part of the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon. And on January 20, 2009, I had the unthinkable, unparalleled honor of singing it at the Inaugural Ball of the first African American president of the United States of America. To this day, “Hero” is one of my most performed songs. Music Box would go on to reach diamond status in the United States and is one of the highest-selling albums of all time.
And here’s a side note with a side eye: A couple of people have come for “Hero,” and for me, with both royalties and plagiarism claims. Three times I have been to court, and three times the cases have been thrown out. The first time, the poor fool going after me had to pay a fine. Initially I felt victimized, knowing how purely the song came to me, but after a while I almost began to expect lies and lawsuits to come with my success—from strangers and my own family and friends. And they won’t stop.
The taping that night in Schenectady took several hours. A television show has so many technical needs—multiple cameras, close-ups, far and cutaway shots, costume changes, hair and makeup touch-ups, extras, audience reactions—it’s a production. When we finally wrapped, I said all my thank-yous to the kids, the choir, the orchestra, and the crew. Then, just as I had come in, I was whisked out the backstage door, which seemed to lead not to the street but straight into the limo.
I plopped into the backseat, buzzing from a contradictory cocktail of exhaustion and exhilaration. As we pulled out into the street, I noticed that where there was once emptiness and a scattering of barricades, there were now crowds of people swelling over the flimsy metal partitions, screaming my name and “We love you!” I noticed the cops too, standing there, unfazed, in the pulsing midst of the energy and excitement. It was one thing to be informed, but quite another to see with my own eyes, hear with my own ears, and feel in my soul the reaction from real people to me and my music. What I felt that night in Schenectady was not idol worship, it was love. It was the kind of love that comes from honest connection and recognition. I was mesmerized as I looked out the window, watching all these people shower me with such love. Not just fans. A family.
As the crowd faded from sight and we neared the outskirts of town, approaching the highway, my high began to wear off. And by the time the wheels touched the tar of the Taconic Parkway, the mood in the car had returned to its routine gloom. Most Thursday evenings Tommy and I would ride up the southern stretch of this highway, leaving glamorous Manhattan behind to spend the weekend in Hillsdale. As the lights and high-rises shrank in the rearview mirror and the magnetic pull of the city dimmed, a part of my life force grew faint as well.
When the car radio, which stayed locked on Hot 97 (their then slogan: “blazing hip-hop and R & B”), would begin to break up, muffled by static, I knew my life as a Grammy award–winning singer-songwriter twenty-something was over. Every weekend, Tommy would turn off the radio that was my lifeline and take a moment of silence before popping in one of his beloved Frank Sinatra CDs. What a tragic metaphor, listening to Tommy hum “My Way” as he drove us back to my captivity.
I was conditioned to either talk shop or go silent on our bleak
