This week, musician Andy Kim will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, an honour bestowed on “songwriters who helped define Canadian culture and shape the global soundscape.”
Having penned some of the most memorable pop-music hits – including Sugar, Sugar and Rock Me Gently – the Montreal native is more than qualified for the accolade. Yet despite his success, he hasn’t achieved the same level of name recognition as many of his contemporaries.
“I’ve come to the realization that people know my music, but they don’t know me. And maybe that’s just the way it was supposed to be,” he told Goldmine magazine, reflecting on the 50th anniversary of Rock Me Gently last year.
Having a low Q Score hasn’t stopped Kim from racking up awards, which include two JUNOs, an induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada for his impact on this country’s musical landscape.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony, which will be held on today in Toronto, will see Kim inducted alongside Jane Siberry, rock trio Triumph and Québécois folk duo Kate & Anna McGarrigle, among others.
At the age of 78, Kim isn’t ready for his final curtain call. This past summer, he performed at the Hoochenanny Whiskey and Music Festival in Rochester, N.Y. And this Christmas, he’ll return to Toronto’s Massey Hall for The Andy Kim Christmas Show – his annual variety showcase that features some of Canada’s top music acts. Over the years, the event has raised millions for a Canadian addictions and mental health charity .
In this 2024 Zoomer cover story, Kim recalls the ups and downs of his music career, before ultimately re-discovering himself as an artist in his third act. –Andrew Wright
– FROM THE ARCHIVES –
June/July 2024
CANDY MAN
From bubble-gum pop to indie rock, Andy Kim changed his tune almost as often as his name. Now, as Michael Barclay reports, the Sugar, Sugar songwriter is not-so-gently rocking a new generation
When pop legend Andy Kim changes his shoes for his Zoomer photo shoot with rock star Bryan Adams in Los Angeles, the stylist notices his toenails are painted white, something one wouldn’t expect to see on a man in his 70s. “It’s nothing new now,” says Kim, whose monochromatic pedicure routine began 25 years ago, after he dropped a 20-pound barbell on his foot during his weightlifting routine. That left his toenails a mess, so he decided he’d at least make them look good with some polish.
Minutes later, the pop star who wrote the summer of 1969’s No. 1 Billboard 100 hit Sugar, Sugar is posing for the rock star who wrote Summer of ’69. “My life has continued to be just the most amazing thing,” Kim says with almost childlike wonder befitting his exceptionally ageless presence. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, Bryan Adams is going to take my picture – I can’t believe this.’ This is like a gold record, to be honest with you.”
Here’s another gold-record moment, from 2006, when Kim was at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame gala in Toronto with his close friend, Canadian balladeer Ron Sexsmith. Kim, who was performing – what else – Sugar, Sugar, met Leonard Cohen for the first time, despite the fact they both grew up in Montreal and launched recording careers in the late 1960s. Sexsmith turned to Cohen and said, “Leonard, do you know Andy Kim? He wrote Sugar, Sugar’” Cohen smiled and paid him the ultimate compliment. “I wish I wrote Sugar, Sugar.”
Kim has spent the last 55 years singing Sugar, Sugar at every show he’s ever played, but the song is not an albatross. It exudes joy, kind of like Kim himself, but it also exemplifies the anonymity that plagues him. Everybody knows the song first “performed” by the fictional Archies band on the animated sitcom, but only music nerds know Sugar, Sugar was co-written by Kim, who sings backup on the 1969 track. That’s OK: the same year he had another gold single, Baby I Love You, under his own name; a year later, he won the inaugural Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist. And you don’t have to be a music nerd to recognize Rock Me Gently, the song he took to No. 1 a half-century ago, even though it is often misattributed to his contemporary, Neil Diamond. He feels Sugar, Sugar got some respect after Wilson Pickett had a Top 10 hit with it and Tina Turner made it unusually sexy. This spring, Bob Marley’s version resurfaced in Sugar, a new Apple+ TV series starring Colin Farrell.
The author of that bubblegum-pop classic says he has led a sweet and blessed life ever since, even though his career ground to halt in the ’80s and ’90s, when music labels wouldn’t touch him. “The A&R [talent] departments loved the music, but believed I had outlived my last two minutes and 30 seconds,” he says, referring to the length of the average ’60s pop hit. “Basically they were looking for new blood.” Then, in his 50s, after the Los Angeles resident bought a second house in Toronto, he met a new generation of Canadian artists like Sexsmith, Barenaked Ladies frontman Ed Robertson and Broken Social Scene co-founder Kevin Drew. Kim’s tenacity in the face of the music industry’s apathy inspires Drew, now 47, who co-founded the indie musical collective that hit it big in 2003 with You Forgot It in People. Says Drew, “He’s every artist’s champion to keep going.”
The man who wrote one of the sunniest pop songs in existence carries an air of melancholy. He’s fine talking about the long periods of rejection in his career, but for a man who writes love songs, he firmly deflects any questions about his romantic life (and, it should be noted, his age). This wistfulness hits him particularly hard at Christmas, so he decided to surround himself with music, the one thing that has always brought him solace. “Music saves your soul,” says Kim, who is well known at home for The Andy Kim Christmas, his annual variety show that has raised millions for charities since 2005.
Upon entering my Toronto apartment, the singer-songwriter – six foot two, dressed in denim and adorned with chunky silver jewelry, including his trademark earrings – can’t help but notice the piano. “You play? Play me something.” Uh, OK, as if that’s not remotely intimidating. So I bust out a ’50s-style chord progression in front of a man who sold millions of records. That’s one way to break the ice, I suppose.
It works. Kim is doing the interview at my place since he is rehearsing nearby for one of 25 gigs this year, and stays for a three-hour conversation about his 60-year career. He settles into my couch, his water bottle within reach, and keeps returning to themes of gratitude and the “angels” in his life, which include the next-gen artists who helped revive his career. In 1995, Barenaked Ladies performed Rock Me Gently with him at jazz singer Molly Johnson’s Kumbaya Festival for Canadian AIDS charities. “It was my first feeling that there was still a pulse left for Andy Kim,” he says.
Robertson composed and co-produced a new Kim single in 2004, I Forgot to Mention. Sexsmith signed on to the first Andy Kim Christmas, and has performed every year since, save one. And Drew co-wrote, produced and performed on Kim’s atmospheric and soulful 2015 album It’s Decided, which landed them on David Letterman’s show.
Andy Kim was born Androwis Youakim to Lebanese immigrants who belonged to the Maronite Church (an Eastern Catholic religion). They lived in a tenement building near Jean Talon Market in Montreal’s Little Italy. Kim, the third of four brothers, says there was a large age gap between the elder two and the younger two, and he was always getting hand-me-downs that didn’t fit because he was the tallest in the family. That’s why, years later, he related to Gifts of Light, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health program that provides clothes and other necessities to people in crisis. “A patient might come there in the middle of night in just a bathrobe,” he says about the main beneficiary of his Toronto Christmas concerts.
“That took me back to being a kid. There wasn’t money for stuff in my family. Having a brand new shirt, a brand new set of sneakers, new jeans – it does help your self-esteem, especially if you have nothing.” – Andy Kim
There were no instruments in the home. Kim didn’t have friends in bands. He listened to New York stations he could pick up in Montreal at night. The first song he remembers hearing on his transistor radio is Be My Baby by the Ronettes. “I didn’t understand anything about it,” he says. “All I knew was I was captured by something that steered me in a way that I could see my future.” He bought a second-hand guitar and scratched out a tune called How’d We Ever Get This Way.
His older brothers brought home 45s and music magazines that listed stats like the songwriters’ names, and the New York City address where many of them worked: 1619 Broadway, a.k.a. the Brill Building. Be My Baby was written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector. Kim decided he had to meet Barry, so the 16-year-old scraped together $40 and bought a bus ticket to New York. His parents allowed him to go since there were Lebanese cousins in New Jersey who could put him up. “I remember my mom telling me to call home a few times a day, collect, just to make sure I was OK in the New York City jungle,” says Kim. “There was one embarrassing moment where the operator said, ‘Oh, hi. I bet you’re calling your mom again?’ I wasn’t afraid of anything.”
After the Montrealer walked into the Brill Building and asked to meet Barry, the veteran songwriter – who co-wrote many of the biggest pop hits of the ’50s and ’60s – gave the lad five minutes. As Kim sang How’d We Ever Get This Way, playing rudimentary guitar with a matchbook folded into quarters as a pick, Barry heard something different. It wasn’t long before they were recording Kim’s songs.
Androwis Youakim anglicized his name and Andy Kim had his first top 40 hit in 1968: How’d We Ever Get This Way went to No. 21 on Billboard and sold 800,000 copies. A year later he gave the world a sugar fix.
But wait: It gets better. In 1974, he spent his own money to record Rock Me Gently, which was not-so-gently rejected by everyone in L.A. Undeterred, Kim moved home to Montreal, started his own record label called ICE (International Canadian Entertainment) and put out the song himself. After it went to No. 1 in Canada and the U.S. and sold three million copies, Kim went to the iconic Capitol Records building in Los Angeles to get his official golden disc. While Kim and executives were meeting in the boardroom, a door opened and John Lennon was standing there, unwrapping the gold record. “Andy Kim!” exclaimed the Beatle. “Rock Me Gently. Congratulations!”
After that whirlwind, Kim’s career began a downward spiral. There was an attempt in the early ’80s to rebrand himself as Baron Longfellow, but everyone knew it was Kim, and only one song, Amour, did OK. At one point, his attorney shopped some demos around L.A. without any identifying information. “This is great. Who is it?” asked one exec. When told it was Andy Kim, the response was swift: “Uh, no thanks.”
The blows were softened by the fact he was fine, financially. Royalties from Sugar, Sugar always kept the lights on. “I could keep a lot of lights on,” he deadpans. That’s because Kim is one of the rare musicians who owns his own publishing rights, which – despite his youthful naïveté back at the Brill Building – he’d insisted on, thanks in part to the guidance of Barry, his mentor.
Sure, as the ’80s wore on, it bothered him that his career seemed to be over. Maybe there was a reason his 1984 single was called I’m Gonna Need a Miracle Tonight, but he was thankful his teenage dream paid off in the first place. That could have been the end of Andy Kim’s professional story, but there was another chapter.
His third act began at the Kumbaya Festival. The show was nationally televised and the response was astounding. People were excited to see him. They remembered his songs. Kim was more than impressed with the creativity happening in Canada, and wanted to be part of it. He started writing and recording with Robertson in 1999, and one of their efforts, the 2005 single I Forgot to Mention, was a top 10 adult contemporary hit in Canada. The same year, Kim was named Canadian Music Week’s Indie Artist of the Year. He was wanted again.
Sexsmith was beyond excited Kim was around to pour some sugar on the scene. “I was a huge fan of Andy’s as a little kid,” says Sexsmith, citing Kim’s 1968 hit, How’d We Ever Get This Way. “That’s not just my favourite Andy song, it’s one of my all-time favourite songs.” They’ve been close friends ever since they met in 2005. “Andy seems to like having me around,” he says. At the Christmas shows “almost always we’re sharing a dressing room – it’s like Martin Short and Steve Martin or something.”
Sexsmith sometimes helps Kim round up talent for the show, and recounts asking a big Canadian star “who shall remain nameless” to perform. “They were like, ‘Well, how could that possibly be cool?’” Sexsmith recalls. “There’s this attitude toward [Andy] that bugs me. He gets tagged with that bubblegum thing. But I’m happy that all these awards and stuff have come his way, that he’s getting some respect.”
Kim was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006, got a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2018, entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2019 and received the Order of Canada in 2023. He remembers when Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson wrote a letter recommending him for the Walk of Fame; it said, “If there isn’t enough room for Andy to get a star this year, please cover up half of mine and give it to him.”
After Drew met Kim at the 2008 Christmas show, he wanted to write and record new music together, but Kim was skeptical. “No one is waiting for a new Andy Kim album,” he told Drew. “Yeah, but I am,” responded the artist, 30 years his junior. The result, It’s Decided, was made with the same team who produced Gord Downie’s Secret Path immediately afterward. There is an audible resemblance between the two records, and both were left turns for well-known men with very different careers.
Drew, who put out a new album last year called Aging, vividly remembers the recording sessions. “When Andy stepped up to the mic, his throat sounded like the blood of a newborn. It was like he had collected all the youth from his adventures over the years and placed that feeling in his songs. I’d never experienced ‘ageless’ before in the studio.”
It was a sign Kim was far from finished. “I didn’t make albums before,” says Kim. “I made hit singles with fillers, and made sure another couple of hit songs were in there as well. It’s Decided changed a lot of people’s perception of me.” He was exhilarated by its reception, but to this day, he still has to book his own shows because he can’t find an agent.
“Nothing matters,” says Kim, who is grateful for mercies, big and small. “Even the tears, even the breakups. Even when your whole career shuts down – it’s another experience in this life, and there are no sequels. Maybe I’m a fool, or maybe I’m not, but ask me if I’m happy. I’m thrilled about it all.”
A version of this article appeared in the June/July 2024 issue with the headline ‘Candy Man’, p. 35.
Creative Director/Producer, Tanya Watt, Fashion Stylist, Joanne Blades/Art Department, Grooming, Louise Moon/CloutierRemix, Prop stylist Tamasin Reid/Art Department, Photography assistants, David Jakle, Travis Fera. Photographed on location at Smashbox Studios, Culver City, L.A.
