An Epic Fail for Clive Davis' "Golden Ear"

On David Forman's vivid and imaginative second album, Who You Been Talking To, made in 1977, finally released in 2026.

After languishing undisturbed in file cabinets and office shelves for decades, David Forman’s second album Who You Been Talking To began circulating a few weeks ago.

And already there’s consensus among the commenterati on YouTube and other social media platforms. One listener’s reaction is typical: “Boggles the mind that Clive Davis could hear this and not think it merited releasing.”

Just check the title track:

Davis, the record executive who founded Arista Records in 1974 after a long tenure at Columbia, was already a legendary “ear” with mysterious powers of musical perception when he added Forman to the roster. But Davis’ real genius was marketing, and he was all-in on Forman’s self-titled 1976 debut. Davis took out full-page ads that proclaimed Forman as a major arrival; the ads quoted Dave Marsh’s lead review for Rolling Stone, which identified Forman as one of the “most interesting writers of the seventies,” and Wayne Robins’ Newsday review, which described Forman as a tunesmith whose phrases are “so memorable some may very well hang like a full moon over eternity.”

So, there was some momentum.

As they developed the songs for a followup, Forman and co-writer David M. Levine sought to transform the piano-centered introspections of the debut into more cinematic creations – weaving detailed skid-row rhapsodies into blue-eyed soul backbeats, the jubilent sounds of early rock against the polished, world-aware songcraft of Laura Nyro and Randy Newman. They wrote street scenes (“Thirty Dollars”) and wistful breakup odes (the trenchant “Painted in a Corner”) and a classic chance-encounter subway song (“A-Train Lady”). That last one is lit up by this memorable couplet:

I saw you in the window, checking out my long hair

I’ll follow far as you go, I believe I’ll find a song there.

Forman lined up Jack Nitzsche – the orchestrational architect of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” and producer of Neil Young’s Harvest and other classics – to arrange and produce.

According to the extensive liner notes of the just-released Who You Been Talking To, Davis didn’t like the choice, but went along after registering his misgivings. Nitzsche brought in an impressive cast of supporting musicians that included guitarists Ry Cooder, Fred Tackett, David Lindley and Scott Mathews, drummer Jim Keltner and vocalist Bobby King. Basic tracks were recorded live in the studio. The backing vocals and Nitzsche’s string arrangements, which accentuated the tense undercurrents beneath the surface of the songs, were added later.

When the album was finished, Davis met with Forman to inform the singer-songwriter that Arista didn’t hear a single and would not be releasing Who You Been Talking To. The liner notes describe Forman’s reaction; he was surprised, hurt, defeated. Davis offered to let him take the album to another label, but Forman didn’t care. He found himself suddenly and profoundly disillusioned. As he recalls in the notes: “The aspects of my trade that I thought were important had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.”

Forman moved on, building a career in commercial music, finding success writing and recording jingles. Other artists covered his songs; Burton Cummings of The Guess Who had a hit with “Dream of a Child” from Forman’s debut. And Nitzsche continued to champion Forman and Levine’s tunes, getting them recorded by Mink Deville, the Neville Brothers, Marianne Faithfull. In 1998, Forman collaborated with producer Rick Chertoff and members of the Hooters on Largo, an ambitious and disarmingly tuneful concept album that featured Carole King, Cyndi Lauper, Taj Mahal and the Chieftains, among others.

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Often in this space, we celebrate releases that are sidebars to history, ephemeral footnote titles that offer after-the-fact insight into some overlooked moment or scene. Who You Been Talking To is not that. Rather, it’s a fully realized swing for the fences from a fertile time, a melding of wild yearning romanticism and street-casual melody and steely-eyed craft. It is alive with the sweeping ambition that animates so much popular music of the ‘70s, and reminds us that not so long ago, the people we now revere as titans – Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits et al – had formidable auteurs on their tails. The big names didn’t own all the stories.

And, correspondingly, the legendary executives were not infallible. They did not always handle their gatekeeping duties with concern for art as part of the decisionmaking. Davis’ emphasis on hits at Arista made him enormously successful; implicit in that success was a parallel sacrifice, or bias, against the kind of artful creativity that isn’t expressed via singles. This carefully annotated release, from Brooklyn reissue label High Moon Records, ever so subtly makes the case that Arista in 1977 was closer to the “one-and-done” model used by labels today than the stepwise nurturing that defined artist development at Warner Brothers in the early ‘70s.

Davis had to know that one day Forman’s second record would see daylight, and when it did, some of the luster around his carefully tended reputation as a golden ear would tarnish a bit. Because the music doesn’t lie. We hear now what he heard then, and cannot process his decision. The business realities that factored into his thinking are long forgotten. The breathtakingly vivid sounds remain, telling their truths, free at last.

Another music industry veteran quoted in the liner notes is Danny Goldberg, who ran Atlantic Records for a time and started several other labels. Having worked under the pressure to create hits, he understands the reasoning behind Davis’ decision. But, he adds, “I am flabbergasted at the decision not to have released the album at all.”