Barry Manilow says a lung collapse nearly killed him after a successful surgery for a cancerous spot on his left lung, derailing his schedule and sending him to the ICU. Now, as he prepares to return to stages in June and release a new album of original materi
Barry Manilow didn’t notice the danger at first—he just felt his body fail him.
At his lowest point. the iconic singer weighed 128 pounds and said he looked in the mirror and saw “one of those pictures you see about the prisoners in Auschwitz.” The comparison wasn’t a dramatization. It was the feeling of being stripped down. medically and emotionally. while his health moved in a direction he hadn’t planned.
It all began after he announced in December that he was postponing his long-running Las Vegas residency and other tour dates. Doctors had found a Stage 1 cancerous spot on his left lung. and while the surgery was described as successful. the recovery quickly turned more dangerous. After the procedure, Manilow developed pneumonia, spent seven days in the ICU, and was hospitalized for close to a month.
Then, in the middle of January, his lung collapsed.
“In the middle of January my lung collapsed, so I had to go back to the hospital,” Manilow said. He added that “the healing actually started in February. ” with doctors telling him it takes about a year for things to come back. Even so. he is focused on the schedule he postponed—and on what he wants to do before time catches up.
By late winter, the physical setbacks hadn’t softened his resolve. His postponed dates are scheduled to resume in early June in the UK. before he returns to his run of The Last Concerts arena shows in the US and his Vegas residency at Westgate. Manilow has been practicing singing in his studio. and he says he’s “pretty close. ” though his voice is noticeably deeper and raspier than in recent years.
“I’m not sure I can do 90 minutes (on stage) … I’m pushing myself as much as I can every day,” he said. “And now and again, I think I’m fine. And then the next day I can’t talk, no less sing.”
For fans, the comeback isn’t just about dates on a calendar. It’s about momentum coming back in the middle of an illness that nearly stopped it.
On June 5, Manilow releases “What a Time,” his first album of original material in nearly 14 years. The album is prefaced by “Once Before I Go,” which he described as wistful, written in the ‘80s by renowned songwriter Peter Allen, and it has reached the Top 10 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
He also corrected a potential misunderstanding about the meaning of the song. “The song is not, as might be connoted, about foreshadowing death, but the dissolution of a romance.”
Still, Manilow doesn’t shy away from how close hospital time brought him to the edge of mortality. He said he had a few scary nights lying awake, thinking about what it means to get that close.
“Nobody thinks about that they’re going to die,” he said. “But a couple of nights I said to myself, ‘Whoa, have I done everything I wanted to do?. Have I been good to people?’ It’s that same story you think of when you get that close (to death). And I was right there, I was inside that. I hope we all think like that if we’re at the edge of (death’s) door.”.
When asked whether he felt he had succeeded at checking those boxes, Manilow returned to what he believes matters most: the emotional ending, not the clinical one.
“Well, I did wonder, ‘What is my epitaph?’ And it would be, I hope I made people feel good. I always wanted to do that. I want people to feel better when they leave my shows than when they came in,” he said. “That’s my goal. Always has been.”
The sequence of setbacks—successful surgery followed by pneumonia, then a lung collapse in mid-January, then months of slow recovery—has shaped not only his body but his sense of urgency. What’s unfolding now is a return he may not be able to fully control, but he is determined to try.
As June approaches, Manilow is preparing to step back into the lights with his voice changed by what happened and his schedule reshaped by what almost ended it. For the singer, the question isn’t whether he can recover; it’s how to make the recovery count while the days are still there.
Barry Manilow collapsed lung pneumonia ICU Las Vegas residency The Last Concerts Westgate Stage 1 cancer left lung What a Time Once Before I Go Adult Contemporary chart Peter Allen