In 1977, Dan Hill had his first big hit with “Sometimes When We Touch”. The song is written by Hill, with music by Barry Mann, for Hill’s Longer Fuse album.
“Sometimes When We Touch” seems like a tender love song. It says, “And sometimes when we touch / The honesty’s too much / And I have to close my eyes and hide / I wanna hold you til I die / Til we both break down and cry / I wanna hold you till the fear in me subsides.” While it is a song of affection, Hill later reveals that he wrote it to get the attention of a girl whom he was in love with at the time.
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“There was this woman that I was falling desperately in love with, and I just thought everybody was naturally monogamous,” Hill recalls. “My parents have always stayed together. Well, this woman didn’t want anything to do with monogamy. She wanted to get close to me, so to speak. But she wanted to be close with a lot of other guys at the same time, and I found this to be terribly distressful. She also liked to tell me about how all the other guys were so much more rich than I was, older, more established.”
Why Dan Hill Wrote “Sometimes When We Touch”
Hill goes on to say that he felt “very inadequate” compared to the other people she was also dating. Realizing he had a gift as a songwriter, although he was making $1.89 working for the civil service at the time, Hill sat down to write what became “Sometimes When We Touch”.
“I was so proud of that lyric,” Hill remembers. “And I taped it right over where I sorted all the mail. So I saw it on the wall, just looked at that lyric, because I was so proud of it.”
Unfortunately for Hill, he played his sometimes-girlfriend “Sometimes When We Touch”, a version of the song before its completion.
“There was this sort of martyr silence on the other end of the phone after she had heard that song, and a long, drawn-out sigh,” Hill says. “And she said, ‘Did anyone ever tell you for a 19-year-old you’re way too goddamn intense? I’m leaving town with a CFL football player. He just got cut. We’re moving to North Carolina.’ Bam, she was gone.”
“Sometimes When We Touch” didn’t get Hill the girl he wanted. But it did earn him a Grammy nomination. In 1985, Mark Gray and Tammy Wynette released a duet version of the song, which became a Top 10 hit.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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