{"id":882,"date":"2026-06-26T12:39:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=882"},"modified":"2026-06-26T12:39:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:39:43","slug":"the-secrets-of-the-diva-whisperer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=882","title":{"rendered":"The Secrets of the Diva Whisperer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When Clive Davis sat down with Aretha Franklin in 1979 to discuss working together, Franklin already had her legacy secure: She was the undisputed Queen of Soul, whose late \u201960s singles\u2014\u201cRespect,\u201d \u201c(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,\u201d \u201cChain of Fools\u201d\u2014would be in rotation \u2019til eternity. Nearing 40, she understood that the music industry had changed since her earlier blush of success. But she hungered to launch a new phase of her career. Davis, speaking later at her funeral, remembered her wondering one thing: Could she still compete?<\/i><\/p>\n

Read more Atlantic Trivia: Indigestion<\/a><\/p>\n

She\u2019d gone to the right man to ask that question. Davis, the record-label executive who died this week at age 94, was one of the best competitors that music ever created. He\u2019s credited with helping break an eye-popping array of artists, including Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow, Patti Smith, and the Notorious B.I.G. While some industry titans are known for a particular sound, and others for their personalities\u2014and scandals\u2014Davis\u2019s approach boiled down to one thing: hits.<\/p>\n

Obituaries over the past week have emphasized the image of him as the businessman with the \u201cgolden ear.\u201d He grew up in a Jewish enclave of Brooklyn, studied law, and then was hired at Columbia Records, where he quickly rose to become president despite previously knowing nothing about the music industry. A visit to the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 tipped him off to the rock-and-roll youth revolution. He signed his first act, Joplin, and then began signing more. Over time\u2014as he launched the label Arista, then J Records, then became the head of BMG North America and RCA Music Group\u2014he developed a reputation for just knowing<\/i> whether a song was destined for success simply by listening to it.<\/p>\n

Yet as I\u2019ve read about Davis\u2019s life, I\u2019ve wondered less about his ear and more about what it took to be the boss of so many seemingly indomitable figures\u2014people who define the word diva<\/i>. He was famed as a micromanager who took a hand in every step of the hitmaking process. Yet he worked productively with some of the most willful talents in music history\u2014because he, fundamentally, magnified their ambition.<\/p>\n

Franklin is a case in point. Davis recalled meeting her in his 2013 memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life<\/i>: \u201cThis was no regal queen content to rest on past laurels. This was a working woman determined to give it her all.\u201d Still, she could be difficult. In the studio, she was known for refusing to give more than a couple of takes, which sometimes caused producers to complain to Davis. \u201cI would always let it go if it was an album track,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut for a potential single I would call her and explain that we had to have a song that we could get on the radio, so she needed to go back in and nail the melody.\u201d Laying out the business upside, in his telling, worked to get her back in front of the mic. Together, they succeeded in landing 1980s hits such as \u201cWho\u2019s Zoomin\u2019 Who?\u201d and the Eurythmics collaboration \u201cSisters Are Doin\u2019 It for Themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trajectory was different for Houston, who was 19 when Davis signed her. She had spent her adolescence being schooled in singing and performing by her musician mother, Cissy, but she was still young and unformed. So Davis took on a tutelary role. After watching her onstage before the 1985 release of her debut album, he wrote her a lengthy letter offering feedback on her performance style. Some of it was quite sharp: \u201cCandidly, when you do a cover, you should have a different interpretation and do it as well or better than the original.\u201d Yet every bit of critique was couched as serving a larger goal for both of them. His comments, he wrote, were \u201conly meant in the spirit of you and I against the world that we have to conquer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Houston really did seem to share that spirit. In the studio, the producer Narada Michael Walden once wrote, \u201cshe was like Muhammad Ali\u201d: obsessed with greatness and not afraid to show it. After she rose to commercial dominance\u2014landing seven consecutive No. 1s on the Hot 100 from 1985 to 1988\u2014she clapped back at commentators who speculated that she was a mere product of Davis\u2019s hitmaking machine. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be with anybody who didn\u2019t respect my opinion,\u201d she told Rolling Stone<\/i> in 1993. \u201cNobody makes me do anything I don\u2019t want to do. You can\u2019t make me sing something I don\u2019t want to sing. That\u2019s not what makes me and Clive click, because if it was, I\u2019d have left Arista a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Here Come Trump\u2019s \u2018Freedom Trucks\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Some artists did bristle at his feedback, however. After Kelly Clarkson won the inaugural season of American Idol<\/i> in 2002, Davis took a direct hand in her career. Her first two albums were radio-friendly blockbusters, but her third album, My December<\/i>, was a darker, more personal effort whose songs she\u2019d insisted on co-writing. When Davis heard an early cut, he informed her that he didn\u2019t hear any hits and recommended that she record some songs written by other people. Though he eventually put out the album in the form she wanted, their disagreement went public.<\/p>\n

In a 2007 Blender <\/i>article, Clarkson angrily recalled a meeting she\u2019d had with Davis. \u201cI said, \u2018Clive, I\u2019m going to make tons of albums. It doesn\u2019t have to be mainstream every time.\u2019 Then he kept bringing up people he\u2019s worked with. \u2018You\u2019re a Whitney! You\u2019re a Mariah!\u2019\u201d (Davis actually didn\u2019t directly work with Mariah Carey.) She shot back: \u201cI don\u2019t want a career like either one of those singers.\u201d In other words, the spat wasn\u2019t merely about sales or creativity. The exec and the artist were misaligned about the goal they were trying to achieve: She wanted to express something; he wanted to win the charts.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Davis solely chased commercialism at the expense of art. He championed the punk poet Patti Smith and didn\u2019t try to steer her choice of collaborators and songs. \u201cI had a lot of guts, not a whole lot of talent, but he had faith in me and let me go out of the gate, just a colt, and stayed with me,\u201d she later said. When he signed the Eurythmics, he thought of them \u201cmore in the category of David Bowie, a creative entity,\u201d he noted in his book. \u201cI didn\u2019t ask to hear new material, and it never dawned on me to submit songs to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Often, he pushed that kind of artist to augment, not scrap, their own writing. An early cut of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.<\/i>,led Davis to pronounce that classic record-exec verdict: Where are the hits?<\/i> Springsteen took the feedback and wrote \u201cBlinded by the Light\u201d and \u201cSpirit in the Night\u201d\u2014which he later called \u201ctwo of the best things on the record.\u201d Springsteen was young and hungry; why wouldn\u2019t he want a smash?<\/p>\n

The 21st century hasn\u2019t produced record-label executives as legendary as Davis for a variety of reasons: the internet\u2019s upending of distribution structures, #MeToo\u2019s complication of the male authority figure in the entertainment world, and the fracturing of pop culture in general. And Davis\u2019s own image came under fire in later years. In 2012, Houston accidentally drowned in her bathtub at the hotel where, hours later, Davis was throwing his famous Grammys pre-party. When he chose not to cancel the event\u2014citing the logic of The show must go on<\/i>\u2014it confirmed some critics\u2019 view that he was more of a self-enriching mercenary than a true steward of artists. As another industry executive told Rolling Stone<\/i> in 2008, \u201cNotice when you talk to Clive how many of his sentences begin, \u2018Then I. Then I \u2026 Then I \u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Davis remained warmly revered over decades by some of the most powerful and prickly figures in the record business. Many people really did see him as a champion for the ideal of music as a meritocracy in which the best songs always win out: \u201cWhat I learned from Clive is that the only thing that matters at the end of the day when you\u2019re making a record is the three and a half minutes of magic,\u201d the executive Jimmy Iovine told the Los Angeles Times<\/i> in 1996. The truth, of course, is that success in music is more complicated than that\u2014it involves marketing, luck, ego. Pay close attention to Davis\u2019s biography and you see that the last one can drive the art form forward even more than money does.<\/p>\n

Read more One Metaphor to End Them All<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clive Davis, who died this week, understood ambition\u2014and how to magnify it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Secrets of the Diva Whisperer - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=882\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Secrets of the Diva Whisperer - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Clive Davis, who died this week, understood ambition\u2014and how to magnify it.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=882\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-26T12:39:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Secrets of the Diva Whisperer\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-26T12:39:43+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882\"},\"wordCount\":1490,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/3b9239afba0c4cd6b8f3167bc80b84e5.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=882\",\"name\":\"The Secrets of the Diva Whisperer - 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