Songfacts®:

• This touching love song was a great fit for Streisand, who had recently married James Brolin. The original inspiration for the song, however, was the boyfriend (and later the husband) of Dean Pitchford, who wrote the song with Michael Gore. Pitchford and Gore wrote the song "All The Man That I Need," which was later a hit for Whitney Houston, but first recorded in 1982 by the disco diva Linda Clifford. Pitchford's boyfriend was a swimmer, and when Houston's version hit, his teammates ribbed him about the song. Says Pitchford: "They thought that I had written 'All The Man That I Need' for Michael. We laughed about that, but a couple of years went by, and I thought, I really should write him a song. And so I wrote the lyric and I gave it to Tom Snow, and he wrote this absolutely gorgeous melody to it. We cut the demo, and then we finished the mix, and we looked at each other and we said, 'Nobody will ever record this song.' (laughs) Especially because Tom and I were used to having pop hits with people like Melissa Manchester and a number of other people, and it didn't sound like anything that the pop market would be interested in. But bless his heart, our friend Jay Landers, who worked a lot with Barbra, heard that song a couple of years later said, 'I have to play this for Barbra.' So then not only did we get a recording of the song I wrote for my husband, Michael, but we got a recording from Barbra Streisand, for goodness sakes.
  
  It was such a good experience working with Barbra that when she next did a Christmas album, she asked us to write a song for it. So the album A Christmas Memory has a song that we wrote called 'Closer.'" (Here's the full interview with Dean Pitchford.)
• Barbra Streisand can be intimidating, but many of her collaborators have found her to be very receptive to ideas that can help her songs. Early in his career, Dean Pitchford wrote the lyrics for "Fame" and learned the importance of diction when his line, "People will see me and cry, Fame!" was sometimes misinterpreted as "People will see me and die." He wanted to make sure something similar didn't happen on this song. Said Pitchford: "Barbra was in the studio working with our friend Jay Landers, and they called Tom and me late one night, and they played us the track as she had recorded it. When they played it for me, there was one lyric I wasn't understanding correctly, and she had also mis-sung a note, and I pointed them out. She was very grateful, and she went back and she corrected both of them. After I got off the phone with her, the phone rang and it was Tom. He said, 'So did you hear it? What did you think?' and I said, 'Well, I was very happy except for this and this.' And he said, 'You didn't say anything, did you?' I said, 'Absolutely, I said something.' He said, 'You gave notes to Barbra Streisand?!?' I said, 'Yes. She called asking for notes, so I gave her notes. We're all collaborators in this. This is going to be the definitive version of the song, and I want it to go out there correctly sung.' And he said, 'I was just so wowed by the vocal that I didn't have anything to say.' I said, Well, that's the difference. I was wowed, but at the same time, I had learned from sorry experience that rather than going, 'Oh, wow, somebody's recording our song,' that there comes a moment where you have to get really clear eared - not clear eyed, but clear eared - and listen to it with a real critical faculty and say, 'Great! Everything is terrific except this and this.' And let's go forward with the most accurate version of the song we possibly can. So whereas I let Irene Cara slide all those years before, I jumped on Barbra Streisand when she offered me the chance. And she was gracious about it. She was just so lovely about it. The thing I've discovered over the years of working with Barbra is that she really wants to be involved in a creative give-and-take. She likes when she's got conversation started."