Review: ‘David Foster: Off the Record’ Chronicles Music Producer’s Career

‘Anyone that calls me an a**hole for the things that I’ve done, I think they’re right,” says the music producer David Foster, and it’s a measure of the comprehensiveness of his approach to existence that he could be talking about either his private life or his career. He allows that he repeatedly walked out on wives clutching the small children the pair had made together, and created similar disruption in recording studios. Even today, members of the band Chicago shudder to speak his name. “David made a record that was his impression of what Chicago should be,” says one bandmate, delicately alluding to how Foster brought the band a stack of hits at the cost of its soul. Foster himself doesn’t mince words about his time with Chicago: “It was a dictatorship.”

“Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” “Hard Habit to Break,” “You’re the Inspiration”: You can’t argue with the success. As much as anyone, Foster understood middle American lite-FM taste and made the records that defined it, from the age of Air Supply till Michael Bublé came along. A Foster track is the quintessence of the inoffensive, the sound of standing in line at a Rite Aid in about 1986. You don’t need to buy his music because it’s everywhere anyway, and yet people did, by the millions, because people like things that are easy, and Foster created the easiest of easy listening. Still, it takes an iron fist to generate so much fluff, as we learn in the amusingly frank documentary David Foster: Off the Record, which is streaming on Netflix.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

‘Anyone that calls me an a**hole for the things that I’ve done, I think they’re right,” says the music producer David Foster, and it’s a measure of the comprehensiveness of his approach to existence that he could be talking about either his private life or his career. He allows that he repeatedly walked out on wives clutching the small children the pair had made together, and created similar disruption in recording studios. Even today, members of the band Chicago shudder to speak his name. “David made a record that was his impression of what Chicago should be,” says one bandmate, delicately alluding to how Foster brought the band a stack of hits at the cost of its soul. Foster himself doesn’t mince words about his time with Chicago: “It was a dictatorship.”

“Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” “Hard Habit to Break,” “You’re the Inspiration”: You can’t argue with the success. As much as anyone, Foster understood middle American lite-FM taste and made the records that defined it, from the age of Air Supply till Michael Bublé came along. A Foster track is the quintessence of the inoffensive, the sound of standing in line at a Rite Aid in about 1986. You don’t need to buy his music because it’s everywhere anyway, and yet people did, by the millions, because people like things that are easy, and Foster created the easiest of easy listening. Still, it takes an iron fist to generate so much fluff, as we learn in the amusingly frank documentary David Foster: Off the Record, which is streaming on Netflix.