First, a necessary act of disambiguation: this is not the “I Can’t Stop Loving You” that Don Gibson wrote and Ray Charles took to number one in 1962. This is a different song entirely — a soft-rock ballad by the English singer-songwriter Billy Nicholls, with that pleading parenthetical, “(Though I Try),” doing the emotional heavy lifting. It was first recorded in 1977 by Nicholls’ own short-lived band, White Horse, to no particular fanfare. A year later Leo Sayer made it the lead single from his sixth album, and it climbed to number six in Britain and earned a Silver disc. Two decades after that, Phil Collins shortened the title, took it to number one on America’s Adult Contemporary chart, and turned Nicholls’ quiet song of surrender into one of the most-played ballads of the early 2000s. Few songs have had three such separate lives. This one earned all of them.
Billy Nicholls: The Teenage Prodigy
William Morris Nicholls Jr. was born on 15 February 1949 into music: his father, Billy Nicholls Sr., was a double bassist and big-band singer who had performed with the Oscar Rabin Romany Band and the RAF’s famous Squadronaires. The son made his mark startlingly young. Still a teenager in the late 1960s, he recorded Would You Believe, a Pet Sounds-influenced album of baroque pop released on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records. The album sank at the time — Nicholls was a talent in search of a business that knew what to do with him — but it refused to stay buried: in 2009 a promotional copy sold on eBay for £7,312, a measure of the cult value collectors now place on it.
Through the 1970s Nicholls worked the engine room of British rock rather than its spotlight. He was a longtime friend and collaborator of Pete Townshend, sang on Who-related projects, and would later tour with The Who in 1989 and again in 1996–97 as backing singer and musical director. His writing was also beginning to travel without him: he contributed several songs to the 1980 film McVicar, starring Roger Daltrey, including “Without Your Love,” which became a success in the United States. What he needed was a song — and a singer — to carry his writing into the charts. In 1977 he formed White Horse with Kenny Altman and Jon Lind, and the trio’s self-titled album for Capitol Records included his new composition “I Can’t Stop Loving You (Though I Try),” running 3:35. The White Horse record came and went. The song, however, was about to be heard by exactly the right people.
Sayer Finds the Song
Leo Sayer was, in 1978, in the middle of the most commercially successful stretch of his career. Working with producer Richard Perry in Los Angeles, he had topped the American charts with “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” and “When I Need You,” and his sixth album — the self-titled Leo Sayer, released on 11 August 1978 — was conceived as a mellower, song-driven record built substantially around outside material. Nicholls’ song fitted the design perfectly, and Sayer placed it third on side one, between the Amazing Rhythm Aces cover “Dancing the Night Away” and Andy Fairweather Low’s “La Booga Rooga.”
The recording assembled for it was a small masterclass in late-seventies Los Angeles session craft. Greg Phillinganes played piano, Toto’s Steve Porcaro added synthesizers, Waddy Wachtel handled electric and acoustic guitars, Leland Sklar played bass, Russ Kunkel drummed, Lenny Castro added congas, and David Campbell supplied the string arrangements that lift the choruses. Sayer’s album version runs 3:29, and his performance is the song’s defining one: the lyric is a confession of failure — the singer has tried to stop loving someone and cannot — and Sayer sings it not as melodrama but as weary fact, his light tenor making the surrender sound almost serene.
Chrysalis released the song as a single on 23 June 1978, ahead of the album, with “No Looking Back” — a Sayer co-write with Tom Snow that closed the album — on the B-side. It was the first single from Leo Sayer, and it set the album’s tone for the British public before the LP arrived.
Number Six and Silver
British record buyers responded immediately. “I Can’t Stop Loving You (Though I Try)” climbed the UK Singles Chart through the summer of 1978 and peaked at number six, spending eleven weeks on the chart with four of them inside the Top 10. The single was certified Silver by the BPI, and the parent album followed it into the UK Top 20, peaking at number 15 and earning a Gold disc. Abroad, Sayer’s single reached number 37 in Australia and number 18 in South Africa, while the album itself was a substantial Australian hit, peaking at number eight.
For Billy Nicholls, it was the breakthrough that Would You Believe and White Horse had never given him: his first real success as a songwriter, delivered by another singer’s voice. It would not be his last word on the song — in 2003 he received an ASCAP award for it, by which time it had become considerably more famous than either of its first two recordings.
The Song Travels: Florida and Nashville
The song’s afterlife began in an unexpected place. The Outlaws, the Florida southern-rock band best known for “Green Grass and High Tides,” recorded “I Can’t Stop Loving You” for their sixth album, Ghost Riders, released on Arista on 22 November 1980. Their version, running 4:21 and stretching the ballad across the band’s guitar-driven sound, sat alongside their hit cover of “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” — proof that Nicholls’ melody could survive translation into an entirely different musical dialect.
The song kept travelling. In 2006, Keith Urban recorded it for his fifth studio album, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, carrying it into contemporary country music nearly three decades after White Horse had first committed it to tape. A song that had begun as an album track by a band almost nobody remembers had become, by steady accretion, a small standard — the kind of composition that publishers dream about and songwriters like Nicholls build quiet careers upon.
Phil Collins Takes It to America
The song’s biggest chapter, though, belonged to Phil Collins. Collins first recorded it in 2000 for a projected album of love songs, then held it back and made it the lead single from his 2002 album Testify, released on 28 October 2002 under the shortened title “Can’t Stop Loving You.” Collins kept the arrangement faithful to the song’s soft-rock nature, with minor lyrical adjustments and one structural addition of his own: a new bridge after the second chorus.
In Britain, Collins’ version peaked at a modest number 28 — respectable, but no threat to Sayer’s number six. America was another story. Adult contemporary radio adopted the record wholesale, and “Can’t Stop Loving You” became Collins’ eighth number one on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart, finishing 2003 as the year’s number two song on that ranking. It reached number 76 on the Hot 100, entered the Eurochart Top 10, hit number three in both France and the Netherlands, and earned Gold certifications in France and Belgium. Collins kept the song in his catalogue, too, including it on his 2004 compilation Love Songs: A Compilation… Old and New and performing it on his final world tour. The song Leo Sayer had introduced to Britain in 1978 had become, twenty-four years later, an American radio staple — for a different singer, under a shorter name.
The chain did not end there. When Taylor Swift performed in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge in 2019, the Phil Collins song she chose to cover was “Can’t Stop Loving You” — meaning that Nicholls’ composition, by then more than forty years old, was being sung to a new generation entirely, most of whom had never heard of White Horse, and many of whom had never heard Leo Sayer’s version either.
A Song Built to Be Inherited
That is, in the end, the story this record tells about how pop music actually works. Songs do not always belong to their first singer, or even to their most famous one. Billy Nicholls wrote “I Can’t Stop Loving You (Though I Try)” and recorded it with White Horse in 1977; Leo Sayer recognised it, gave it the definitive early performance and a UK number six in 1978; the Outlaws and Keith Urban carried it across genre borders; and Phil Collins, recording it in 2000 for a love-songs project, finally made it an American number one in its field. Each singer found the same thing in it — a melody sturdy enough, and a lyric honest enough, to survive being handed on.
Sayer’s version remains the hinge on which the whole history turns. Without the Silver-certified hit of 1978, there is no standard for the Outlaws to cover, no song for Collins to rediscover. The parenthesis in the original title says everything about the song’s theme: the trying is hopeless, and the loving goes on anyway. Pop songs, it turns out, work the same way.