Killing Me Softly with His Song

Killing Me Softly with His Song

Author: BBC Radio 4 December 10, 2022 Duration: 27:52

"Strumming my pain with his fingers... Singing my life with his words..."

Killing Me Softly with His Song is a song about the pleasure and embarrassment of being seen.

The feeling that someone has reached into your deepest, most private feelings, and laid them bare. It's a song about a singer, and about what music can do and a love song that feels at once happy and sad.

The song was a huge hit in two different generations. It won Grammy Awards for The Fugees in 1997 and for Roberta Flack in 1974.

Ray Padgett is author of Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time. He unfolds the layers of the song's history as a famous cover of a famous cover.

Musicologist Nate Sloan explores what the song does harmonically, oscillating between major and minor chords to create a sense of uncertainty and longing.

Lori Lieberman tells the story of the Don McLean concert that inspired her lyrics for the song, that she was the first to record as a young singer-songwriter in 1972.

It's a song that transports Tiff Murray back to the hot New York summer of 1996, when the Fugees version blared out everywhere. For her it was the soundtrack to falling in love while far from home.

It's also a love song for Julie Daley, but now with a sharp edge. Dr Robin Boylorn listened to the Fugees version as a self-conscious teenager and felt a flush of recognition.

Ben heard it the Christmas he first came to the UK from South Africa, played by a busker early one morning in Covent Garden as the first snow he'd ever seen began to fall.

Perminder Khatkar has treasured the song since it played in the delivery room during the birth of her first child.

Producer: Mair Bosworth

A BBC Audio production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in December 2022.


There’s a certain piece of music that, when you hear it, seems to stop time. It might be a melody from your childhood, a song that played at a pivotal moment, or a composition that simply reaches into your chest and grips your heart. Soul Music, from BBC Radio 4, is built around that very phenomenon. This isn’t a program about genres or charts; it’s an intimate exploration of why specific pieces of music carry such profound emotional weight. Each episode focuses on a single, iconic work-from classical adagios to folk ballads, from film scores to pop anthems. The podcast weaves together the voices of people whose lives have been indelibly marked by that music: listeners share personal, often moving stories of grief, joy, love, and remembrance, while composers and performers might shed light on the piece’s creation. You’ll hear the music itself, of course, but framed in a way that reveals its deeper resonance in human experience. It’s a quiet, thoughtful series that reminds us how soundtracks our inner lives. Tuning into this podcast feels like being part of a conversation about the invisible threads that connect us all through notes and rhythms, exploring how a sequence of sounds can become a vessel for collective memory and feeling.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Soul Music
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