Brock / Sarah

Wearing Adams House Raft Race merch, in a publicity shot for Sanders Theater gig, 1974.

Harvard soccer days.

With best man Andrew “Thank you for being a friend” Gold at Brock and Joy’s wedding, Dec 1977.

Singing “Doo Ron Ron” with Linda Ronstadt and Andrew Gold at the wedding reception.

In the recording studio in 1986 with Aretha Franklin and Leon Russell in Detroit for “We Belong Together.”

Brock, 2024.

Sarah, with her prized 00-18 Martin and cousin Kyle, 1972.

With her prized cover band, The Savage Detectives, Lower East Side, 2014.  They had a playlist of at least 15 songs, and lasted five years.   Eliza Grace Martin, Sarah's daughter sang back-up.  Beautifully.

Looking legit in a now-defunct Ludlow Street club in 2016.

05-23-2025

Brock Walsh talks to friend and classmate Sarah Crichton about what happens when your life is a song—as in writing songs for everyone from Aretha Franklin and Aaron Neville to the Pointer Sisters, Earth Wind and Fire, and Bette Midler. Not to mention co-producing the hit “Thank You For Being a Friend” for Andrew Gold, who wrote the song for Brock.

Not long after graduating from Harvard, Brock moved to Los Angeles and spent his first three years as a touring musician—playing piano and guitar and singing backup vocals for Linda Ronstadt and Andrew Gold. “It’s so serendipitous and fortunate, it’s crazy,” he says of his early career in the music business. “It was literally like grad school for rock ’n’ roll.”

In 1980, he became a staff songwriter for Universal Music. “It was as close to the Brill Building as Hollywood came,” he recalls. For ten years, assignments poured in from record producers, like Quincy Jones and Richard Perry, who was looking for a hit single for his next album with the Pointer Sisters. Brock sent him a cassette tape, featuring the sounds of his Roland TR808 drum machine with its telltale computerized snare drum, which became the signature sound of the song “Automatic,” along with Ruth Pointer’s distinctive contralto voice.

Some of his songs, he would learn, took on lives of their own. With “Lullabye in Blue,” the song he co-wrote with Adam Cohen about a mother who gave up her baby for adoption, Bette Midler’s rendition of it “will crush your poor heart,” Brock says. And then, there is the part where people’s souls are touched, too. “Of course, everything we write is out there in the world. Maybe it’s not having as much of an effect as we wish it to, but somewhere someone is listening to it and it’s having some emotional effect on them—and in some cases, big effects. And that’s kind of amazing.”

Perhaps the biggest impact of all comes with the fullness of time. “Thank You For Being a Friend,” which would become popularized as the theme song for the TV series The Golden Girls, was “the best known song I’ve ever worked on,” Brock says. “And now, Andrew’s not here anymore. And all we’ve got is that song.”