1941-1994 · American singer-songwriter · RCA Victor
Nilsson was a Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter who built a career on studio craft and vocal overdubbing rather than touring. He recorded “Everybody’s Talkin’” for his 1968 RCA Victor album Aerial Ballet; issued as a single that July, it reached only No. 13 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under chart, short of the Hot 100. John Schlesinger then chose it as the theme of Midnight Cowboy, and the reissued single went to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and won Nilsson a Grammy. The performance is genuinely definitive — the only error is chronological. He died in 1994.