Olivia Newton-John and her daughter are teaming up for a special project. ET's Rachel Smith spoke to the 72-year-old singer and her daughter, 35-year-old Chloe Lattanzi, about how their new duet, "Window in the Wall," came to be.
Though Newton-John "really had not planned on recording again," she changed her tune after receiving the song from a special source.
"This one woman who I met at a health clinic sent me a song and says, 'I have been called to send this song to you. I believe you need to record it. It was written by my cousin,'" Newton-John recalled. "I thought, 'Oh gosh, what if I hate it?'"
Newton-John's fear was unfounded, as she and her husband, John Easterling, "became really emotional because the lyrics really hit us." After deciding that she "had to record" the song, Newtown-John immediately knew who she wanted by her side for the process.
"The only person I thought of was Chloe to sing it with me, because it was such a personal song," Newton-John said. "Luckily she agreed. It is not really her genre of music, but it was a very special thing to do it with her."
"I was honored that out of all the people my mom could have asked, she asked me," Lattanzi said. "That meant the world to me."
Recording the song with her daughter was "a very special healing process" for Newton-John, and she hopes the result will likewise affect those who listen to it.
"When I heard the song for the first time, it touched my heart because it is about seeing another person's point of view and still loving them and understanding them," she said. "In this particular time in the world, it is the perfect message, to have compassion for each other and friendship for each other in this very unusual time on the planet."
"We are all so connected and we need to value that connectiveness, not our divisiveness," Newton-John continued. "Just to share in the love, because we are all here at this time together on the planet, and we are all one."
In addition to recording the song together, the mother-daughter duo also filmed an accompanying music video. Shot at Newton-John's California home over the course of a day, the location only added to the song's meaning.
"In the bottom of our property, we have a seasonal river... We're lucky that was running at this particular time," Newton-John said. "[The] synchronicity was amazing. The whole synchronicity of how I found the song, how the river was running, how we had one of the warmest days we'd ever had in the winter to film it on. It was just like, everything is perfect."
As for new music, Newton-John's duet album will come out in "the next few weeks or months," but she is otherwise uncertain of her recording future. "If I do it, it'll be for fun," she said. "We'll see what happens."
Lattanzi, however, is hard at work on new music, a process during which she always keeps her mom's past advice in mind.
"I started recording and I got signed at a very young age. When I was making my album, I was listening to a lot of Mariah [Carey] and Christina Aguilera and doing all the riffs and everything," Lattanzi recalled. "And [Newton-John] said, 'It's so much more important, Chloe, that you come from your heart and you make people feel something. You can have an imperfect note, but, as a singer, it's much more important that people feel you than you showing off vocal tricks.'"
"I think that was one of the most profound pieces of advice as an artist that I got from her," she continued. "We're very, very different. I'm a very different kind of artist and I like that. I like that we're different people."
Though she's unsure of what the future holds career-wise, Newton-John said she's "doing really well" and feels "great" physically, following three battles with cancer.
"I have to thank my husband so much for how I feel, because he's been growing medicinal cannabis on our property. He has a laboratory here to find the best strains for what I'm going through. It's helped me so very much. Amazonian her plants that I take [help] as well," she said. "We started a foundation, The Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, to raise money to fund research to study plant medicine for cancer. That is our mission."
"I'm feeling so well," she added. "I'm very, very grateful."
"Window in the Wall" is available now., while the paperback edition of Newton-John's 2019 memoir, Don't Stop Believin', will be released Tuesday, Jan. 26.
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