Barry Manilow Passed On Writing A Jingle For This Product — And We Don't Blame Him

Before he was the king of soft-rock ballads, Barry Manilow was the guy making sure America couldn't stop singing about adhesive bandages. Even decades later, Manilow's 1975 Band-Aid jingle is still embedded in our subconscious, and that's not the only one. "They have been airing 'State Farm is there' for over 40 years," Manilow said in an interview with People. "It's my greatest hit!" Early in his career, the future pop star worked on jingles for products ranging from insurance to fried chicken to acne cream. At one point, he was even asked to write a jingle for a dou*** (a feminine hygiene product).

As a struggling musician who needed to pay rent, Manilow had to make sacrifices. Instead of singing love songs that made people cry, he sang about cleaning products. Manilow later admitted on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" that there were some "low points ... like the 'toilet bowl blues.'"

He was referring to "Bathroom Bowl Blues," a jingle for Green Bowlene, a gig he later talked about apologetically. To be fair, most musicians have a phase they'd rather forget, like experimental hairstyles or synth sounds, and Manilow's such dalliance was with sanitary and hygiene products. He explained his decision to Ellen DeGeneres years later: "This was the act of a desperate young man, you know, how could I say no to that?" However, he did say no to a very specific feminine hygiene product that the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists strongly advises against using.

On "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Manilow revealed that he had once been asked to write a commercial for a feminine product. But he worried that he might be taking things a bit too far and turned it down. Even starving musicians have standards, as Manilow alluded, saying, "There's just so far you can sink." Then he offered an even more practical songwriting problem, that nothing rhymes with the product. Moose? Noose? Loose? Not exactly the lyrical foundation for a cheerful feminine hygiene ad.

But if anyone could make such a melody work, it'd be Manilow. His jingle work was so influential that he received an honorary Clio at the awards' 50^th anniversary. Upon accepting the award, Manilow said (via Adweek), "I learned the most about music working in the jingle industry. It was the best music college I could ever imagine." And that's coming from a man who studied at New York College of Music and Juilliard. The education clearly paid off, leading to a Grammy, three Billboard No. 1 hits, and plenty of underrated Manilow tracks that should also have gone to No. 1.

Still, "Fanilows" can't help but wonder what might have been. Could Manilow have plunged the depths of creativity and turned feminine hygiene into an earworm? Could the result have topped any ranking of Manilow's catchiest jingles? Could he have had commercial feminine product success in the bag? Those answers have been flushed into a dark, unknown place — and that's probably a good thing.