1979 · Behind the Songs
A rocker’s letter to his father, carried into the pop charts.
“Ships” began far from Manilow’s world. It was written by Ian Hunter, the former Mott the Hoople frontman, for his 1979 solo album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic, and it is widely understood as a song about Hunter’s own distant father — two people like vessels signaling across dark water. Hunter released it as a single, and it went nowhere. Months later, Manilow heard it, cut it for his One Voice album with co-producer Ron Dante, and released it in October 1979 on Arista with “They Gave in to the Blues” on the B-side. His version climbed to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 4 on the Adult Contemporary chart; Cash Box praised an arrangement handled with “the utmost taste” and declared that Manilow’s vocals had never been better.
The reason Manilow chose the song gave the record its second life in the press. As Casey Kasem told American Top 40 listeners on October 27, 1979, Manilow’s own father had been absent since he was two years old. In 1975, after a concert, a stranger walked into his dressing room, said simply that he was Manilow’s father, that he had enjoyed the show and would like to see him again — and then left. Heard with that story in mind, “Ships” stops being a cover and becomes a confession: the soft-rock showman and the glam-rock songwriter, each singing to a father who was never quite there.