It begins with the quietest of images: the world seen from far away, where borders blur and the noise falls silent. Then Bette Midler’s voice enters, warm and unhurried, singing about how different everything looks when you step back — how, from a distance, the world looks blue and green, and there is harmony, and hope, and no one in need. When Midler released “From a Distance” in the autumn of 1990, it became one of the defining ballads of the decade, a number two hit in America, a Grammy winner, and, almost by accident, the song a nation reached for as it went to war. What almost nobody knew at the time was that the song had not come from a hit factory or a star’s songwriting camp. It had come from a secretary in a tiny New York apartment, written in about two hours on a childhood piano that had arrived frozen solid in a moving truck — a song its own writer had sent to dozens of artists and record companies, only to be told, again and again, that nobody wanted it.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Bette Midler stood in 1990. She was not a newcomer, and she was not a nostalgia act. She was, quite simply, one of the great survivors of American entertainment. Born in Honolulu in 1945, Midler had begun as the Divine Miss M, the bawdy, brassy cabaret star of New York’s Continental Baths in the early 1970s, then conquered Broadway, film and pop in turn: a Grammy for Best New Artist, the hit albums of the 1970s, the film The Rose in 1979, and, by the late 1980s, a remarkable second act as a movie star and ballad singer. In 1988 she had starred in Beaches, and its theme, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” had become her first American number one and won the Grammy for Record of the Year. She was, in other words, at the very peak of her commercial powers — and she was looking, as she always had, for material worthy of that voice: big, emotional songs with something to say. “From a Distance” would become the centrepiece of her next album, Some People’s Lives, released in the autumn of 1990. But the song itself had been waiting, patiently, for five years.
The song had begun, improbably, with a birthday present. Its writer, Julie Gold, was a young singer-songwriter who had come to New York with dreams of a songwriting career and was paying the rent with office work. By 1984 she had a full-time job as a secretary at HBO, and she wrote songs in her spare time, sending demos out to anyone who might listen. In December 1985, just after her thirtieth birthday, her parents sent her a gift from Philadelphia: the upright piano she had played as a child. The movers who delivered it warned her not to play it for a day, because the instrument had sat on a cold truck and was, in Gold’s own phrase, like a brick of ice. She obeyed, though it cost her: she spent the night in her loft bed, looking down over the edge at the piano below, hugging it and polishing it, unable to touch the keys. The next morning she came down the steep ladder, sat at the piano, and wrote “From a Distance.” By her own account it took about two hours, the words and music arriving together, and when it was finished she kissed the piano keys — a ritual she still practises — and wondered aloud whether it might be the last song she would ever write.
What she had written was a song about perspective. Gold has said, in interview after interview, that she set out to write a decent song about the difference between the way things seem and the way things are: from a distance, the world looks peaceful and whole, but up close it is full of hunger, war and need. The lyric’s famous device — the world looks blue and green from far away, the eagle flies, the instruments play, and “God is watching us” — was, for Gold, a way of holding two truths at once: the beauty of the world as it might be, and the pain of the world as it is. She did not write it as a religious statement, and she has gently resisted the readings that turned it into one. It was, she said, a song about hope and the human potential for kindness, about the gap between what we see and what we know. That ambiguity would later become part of the song’s power — and part of its controversy — because listeners heard in it whatever they most needed to hear.
For years, almost nobody wanted to hear it at all. Gold sent the song out widely, and it came back with polite refusals. She later recalled that she had sent it to so many artists and record companies that she began asking friends what was wrong with it. The turning point came through a friend, the folk singer Christine Lavin, who had met Gold in songwriting workshops and swapped songs with her. Lavin mailed Gold’s demo to Nanci Griffith, the Texas singer-songwriter whose crystalline voice and storyteller’s ear made her one of the most respected folk-country artists of the decade. Griffith loved the song the moment she heard it, Gold recalled, and wanted to record it right then and there. On May 5, 1986, Griffith called to ask to record it — the first song of Gold’s that anyone had ever recorded. Griffith cut it for her 1987 album Lone Star State of Mind, and in Ireland it became a sleeper hit, spending seventeen non-consecutive weeks in the Irish Top 30 during 1988 and peaking at number nine that April. In America, though, it made little impression, and Gold’s song remained, for most listeners, unknown.
The song’s long road to Midler ran through a series of near-misses that now read like a fable about the music business. Gold got a new hook when American Airlines used Griffith’s version to score a “Looking Back at the 1980s” video shown on its flights in 1990, and she used that opening to get the song in front of Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records and one of the most famous hit-makers in the business. Davis’s reply, returned the next day, was gracious and devastating: “From a Distance” was, he wrote, a beautiful song worthy of a Joni Mitchell authorship, but he was only looking for hit songs, and he had to pass. Gold went home, as she later told it, and tried to protect herself by expecting nothing. Then the answering machine flashed. The voice on it belonged to Mark Shaiman, who worked with Bette Midler, and who had heard about the song from Steven Holden of The New York Times. Shaiman wanted to hear it. Gold sent it out, telling herself it would not happen — and heard back almost instantly. Her life, she said, changed.
Midler’s version, produced by the legendary Arif Mardin, stripped away the folkiness of Griffith’s recording and gave the song the big, polished 1990s production it needed to reach millions. Mardin, who had produced everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Bee Gees, understood exactly what the song required: a setting grand enough for its vision, but restrained enough to let Midler’s voice carry the feeling. Midler sang it not as a folk confession but as a declaration, her voice rising over strings and piano with the authority of a woman who had spent twenty years on stage learning how to hold a room. The single was released on September 19, 1990, as the lead single from Some People’s Lives, with “One More Round” on the B-side, and it behaved like a classic from the first weeks. It reached number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and number two on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Top 100, held off the very top by Stevie B’s “Because I Love You (The Postman Song).” It also reached the top ten in Australia (number eight), Canada (number seven), Ireland (number three) and New Zealand (number three), and, after a re-release in 1991, number six in Britain, where it had originally failed to make the top forty when released at the same time as Cliff Richard’s competing version. The album itself became the biggest commercial success of Midler’s musical career, peaking at number six on the Billboard 200 and going double platinum in America.
Then history intervened, and the song took on a life its writer had never planned. In January 1991, as American troops went to war in the Persian Gulf, “From a Distance” was climbing the charts, and listeners began hearing it as something more than a pop ballad. It became, in the phrase of the time, an anthem of the Gulf War: a song about a world that looked peaceful from far away, played on radio stations and at gatherings for troops and their families, offering comfort in a moment of fear. Gold was later given the US Army’s Minute Man Award for heartening the troops during the war, an honour that captured the strange journey of her song — from a secretary’s apartment in New York to the front lines of a war she had never imagined writing about. Midler herself leaned into the moment, and the song’s association with the war became permanent, for better and for worse: for many listeners it remains inseparable from that winter of yellow ribbons and televised bombing, a song about hoping the world might one day look the way it does from a distance.
The honours that followed confirmed what the charts already knew. At the Grammy Awards in 1991, “From a Distance” won Song of the Year for Julie Gold — the songwriter’s prize, awarded to the writer rather than the performer — a vindication, five years after she had written it on a frozen piano, for every artist and executive who had passed on it. The song was also certified platinum in America, Midler’s second million-seller within two years after “Wind Beneath My Wings.” And the song’s afterlife has been longer than its chart run. It has become a staple of memorial services, charity concerts and moments of national grief, the record people reach for when words fail and a simple image — the world, seen from far away, whole and at peace — is the only comfort on offer. Other artists have kept recording it, from Cliff Richard’s 1990 version, which reached number eleven in Britain, to the many choir and school arrangements that have made it a standard of the repertoire. It is, by now, one of those songs that belongs less to its singer than to its listeners.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to Julie Gold. She had come to New York with an electric piano and a dream, worked as a secretary to pay the rent, and, on the morning after her thirtieth birthday, written a song in two hours that she thought might be her last. She sent it to everyone she could think of, watched it be recorded by a folk singer, watched it become a sleeper hit in Ireland, watched Clive Davis pass on it, and then watched it become, in Bette Midler’s voice, one of the biggest songs in the world. The song she wrote about the difference between how things seem and how they are turned out to be, itself, a lesson in that difference: from a distance, a career looks like a straight line from talent to triumph, but up close it is a secretary polishing a frozen piano, a friend mailing a demo, a singer in Texas saying yes, and a star in New York hearing a song on an answering machine and knowing, instantly, that it was hers. “From a Distance” is the sound of that long, unlikely journey, and of a world that, for three and a half minutes, looks exactly as hopeful as Gold always believed it could be.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment Midler’s voice lifts over the strings. It is the sound of a song that waited five years to be heard — and then, all at once, was heard by everyone.