That Lovin' Feeling of Cynthia Weil

With Barry Mann, the Late Songwriter Put Her Heart Into Words

When word came of the death of lyricist Cynthia Weil June 1 at age 82 last week, I was in Tulsa, Okla., at the World of Bob Dylan Conference. I couldn't process the news: I was in a hermetically sealed hermeneutic Bob bubble.

The importance of the songs written by Weil and her co-writer and longtime husband Barry Mann are often underestimated. They were one of a matched set of songwriting teams, almost all young Jews from Brooklyn, that flourished in the hothouse of competitive composing sometimes known conceptually as "the Brill Building." It was a high-rise in midtown that housed music and song publishing companies; many of the writers worked in other buildings in the area, but the idea of the "Brill Building" is as catchy as any song these teams wrote. Which is essentially the early history of 1960s rock & soul, aside from Motown and Stax, as created by Mann and Weil along with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Jeff Barry…