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Article intéressant du Billboard sur cette Bande Originale devenue tellement culte ...

'Grease' at 40 : Olivia Newton-John, Frankie Valli & John Farrar Reflect on the Blockbuster Songs

by Chuck Arnold

...... Newton-John—who was a "reluctant Sandy," insisting on doing a screen test after the failure of her 1970 musical film Toomorrow—asked that her frequent collaborator John Farrar be brought in to produce and write two of the four new songs added to the original Broadway score by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. 
"It's always great fun recording with John [Farrar] because he's been my friend since I was 15," says Newton-John of her fellow Melbourne, Australia native, who she had worked with on hits like 1973's "Let Me Be There," 1974's "I Honestly Love You" and 1975's "Have You Never Been Mellow." "I think John Farrar is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He's a brilliant musician."



Farrar's first task was to write a showcase ballad for Newton-John. "Apparently they needed a ballad for her that wasn't in the [Broadway] show. 
Luckily I came up with 'Hopelessly Devoted to You,'" says Farrar of the Oscar-nominated tune that displayed country-pop strains of Newton-John's early solo work. "Obviously it needed to be a brokenhearted song, and it had to have a '50s sort of feel.
One of the songs that I always loved was Skeeter Davis' 'The End of the World,' so I wanted to get the same sort of feeling as that song. My song ended up being nothing like that, but that's what started me off on it. I think [Olivia] liked it straight away."





Indeed, when Newton-John heard the "Hopelessly Devoted to You" demo sung by Farrar, she was instantly smitten. "I loved it," she says. "It's a hard song to sing; it's rangy, and so it was challenging. But I thought it was a knockout song." Newton-John's bittersweet vocal perfectly captured the yearning of the lyrics. "She's got that lovely, emotional quality in her voice that people understand," says Farrar. "People just seem to look right into what she's saying somehow."

After "Hopelessly Devoted to You," Farrar went to work on a duet for Newton-John and Travolta. "They asked me if I would try and write the song at the end where they both dance together. So I did 'You're the One That I Want,'" says Farrar. "[Musical supervisor] Bill Oakes was a really big help coming up with the lyrics to that song. He explained to me how the characters would have this transition, that Olivia would become very aggressive."

Read more at https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8317176/grease-soundtrack-olivia-newton-john-more

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