From Alice Cooper to Destiny's Child, a brief history of David Foster's wildly eclectic music career

This is the second in a series of articles about the 2022 Governor General's Performing Arts Awards laureates. 

It is kind of hard to wrap your head around the extent to which David Foster's fingerprints are all over the last half-century's worth of popular music. David Foster is to modern music what corn is to modern food: in everything, even the things you'd least expect. 

If you think of David Foster, and you just think about his work with Whitney Houston, or Celine Dion, or "Tears Are Not Enough," or the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic Theme, or the fact that he has been, at different times, step father to both Brody Jenner and Bella and Gigi Hadid, you're really only scratching the surface of the Fosterverse.  

In fact, if you think about David Foster, and you picture his work with Quincy Jones, Kenny Loggins, Dolly Parton, Josh Groban, All-4-One, NSYNC, Gloria Estefan, both Brandy and Monica, Andrea Boccelli, Boz Scaggs, Madonna, Olivia Newton-John, Babyface, Barbra Streisand, Air Supply, DeBarge, Michael Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, Chicago and The Manhattan Transfer, you're still only really on the first layer of what Foster has done.

As we celebrate Foster's Governor General's Award for the Performing Arts, here are some career highlights to chew on.

Skylark, "Wildflower" (and stints working with Chuck Berry and Ronnie Hawkins)

While still a teenager, Foster worked as a touring keyboard player for both early rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry — including on a U.K. Tour — and Arkansas-born Canadian rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins. 

His stint with Hawkins wound up kick-starting his career. Foster's first chart hit, 1973's "Wildflower," came as a member of the group Skylark. The group was mostly made of former members of Hawkins' band. While Skylark disbanded shortly after, "Wildflower" helped put Foster on the map. 

Earth, Wind and Fire, I Am

Foster was a frequent collaborator with Earth, Wind and Fire in the late 1970s and early '80s, but his influence is especially prevalent on 1979's I Am, where he was credited on five of the album's nine tracks. Among them is "After the Love Has Gone," which is probably one of the great break-up songs of all-time.

Alice Cooper, From the Inside

Shock rock forefather Alice Cooper might be the last person you'd expect to have collaborated with David Foster, but that's the brilliance of Foster. He can work with anybody. 

Foster produced Cooper's 1978 album From the Inside and has a number of songwriting credits on it too. From the Inside is a concept album about Cooper's time in a New York State mental hospital, where he went due to alcoholism. The characters in the songs are based on people Cooper met during his stay. 

The Tubes, The Completion Backwards Principle and Outside Inside

In the 1970s, San Francisco proto-punk/glam rock/art school band The Tubes were cult favourites. Their over-the-top live show and incisive critiques of modern culture earned them passionate fans. 

Unfortunately, it didn't help them sell many records. Said live show was expensive and hard to tour, and doing things like making a concept album based loosely on Jerzy Kosiński's novel Being There gave them a limited audience. They were released by their label A&M, and their new deal with Capitol allowed the label to drop them at any point if they were deemed to be underperforming.

The Tubes needed to make a record that people other than die-hards would buy. So they enlisted the help of David Foster as both producer and songwriter. The resulting album, The Completion Backward Principle, was their most successful to date, producing the (Foster-penned) hit single "Talk to Ya Later." Their next album for Capitol, Outside Inside — also produced by Foster — gave the band their only top-10 single, "She's a Beauty."

Tubes frontman Fee Waybill credits Foster with saving the band.

"If it hadn't have been for David Foster, we would have been done in 1980," he told the San Francisco Herald in 2001. "After we got released from A&M, that would have been it. It would have been over."

Chaka Khan, "Through the Fire"

First of all, we should just take a moment to appreciate "Through the Fire" on its own merits. It is a tremendously powerful ballad, and the soaring chorus functions as a sort of Turing Test. If it doesn't make you feel something, you might be a machine.

But think about this: in a world where David Foster doesn't co-write "Through the Fire," Kanye West never samples it, and may never make his transition from Jay-Z's favourite producer to full-on global megastar. 

As much as Kanye's been a pretty lousy person in the last few years, can you imagine a world in which those first four Kanye albums don't exist? I mean, you can, but it sounds pretty awful.

Destiny's Child, "Stand Up for Love"

This 2005 World Children's Day anthem was actually the last single Destiny's Child released before disbanding, and was written by Foster and his daughter, Amy Foster-Gilles. 

Weirdly, since Foster and Beyoncé are iconic hit makers, it didn't do that well commercially, except in South Korea, where it was an enormous hit and has been covered by no less than three different K-pop acts