Hill was born in Toronto, the son of social scientist and public servant Daniel G. Hill and social activist Donna Mae Hill (nee Bender, 1928–2018), and older brother of the author Lawrence Hill and the late novelist Karen Hill. His musical talent was apparent from a young age, and he received his first guitar shortly after his tenth birthday. While in high school, he was singing and performing at concerts and coffee houses. At one point Hill was working for the Ontario provincial government sorting mail and delivering supplies, while performing at the Riverboat at night. Before finishing high school, he recorded a demo tape with the assistance of his boyhood friend Matt McAuley, later a well-known composer and arranger. In 1972, he signed a contract with RCA, who released a single the following year but did little to advance his career.

Continuing to record with McCauley, he succeeded in breaking the RCA contract and signing with GRT Records, an independent Canadian label. In 1975, they released his first Canadian hit single,”You Make Me Want to Be,” which was followed by his first album, Dan Hill.

In 1977, Hill recorded the ballad “Sometimes When We Touch”. He also wrote the lyrics and was assisted in the music by Barry Mann for the album from the same year, Longer Fuse, and it was released as a single. It was Hill’s biggest hit, peaking at No. 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Canadian RPM Singles chart, and leading to Hill’s appearances on The Merv Griffin Show and The Mike Douglas Show. Tina Turner covered the song in 1978 on her album Rough.

Another one of his hit songs was “It’s a Long Road”, which he recorded for the 1982 action movie First Blood. In 1985, he was one of the many Canadian performers to appear on the benefit single “Tears Are Not Enough” by Northern Lights. Although he had many hits in his native Canada, further singles did not fare as well in the United States, where, after “Let the Song Last Forever” in late 1978, he went almost a decade without cracking any of Billboard’s singles charts.

In 1987, Hill returned to the Billboard Hot 100 with the Top 40 hit “Can’t We Try”, a duet with the then-unknown Vonda Shepard (her last name was incorrectly spelled “Sheppard” on the label). It peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100. He also had a near Top 40 hit with “Never Thought (That I Could Love)”. Both records reached No. 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart and set the stage for Hill to have three more top 10 U.S. AC hits through to 1991’s “I Fall All Over Again”, though he did not make the Hot 100 again after “Never Thought”.

As one of the new Canadian singers and songwriters, such as Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan, who emerged from the coffeehouses and other small venues during the 1970s, Hill belongs to the generation who achieved a prominent place in Canadian popular culture. In addition to his Grammy for his work on Celine Dion’s “Falling into You”, he received five Juno Awards and other prestigious awards. A road trip to a Hill concert was the subject of the 1994 Canadian comedy film, South of Wawa. Although he has performed less frequently in recent decades, in 2007, he toured with the CBC Radio program The Vinyl Cafe.

Hill wrote an article in the 14 February 2008 edition of Maclean’s entitled “Every Parent’s Nightmare”, about the terror he experienced from friends his son brought home. On 14 March 2008, CBC Television’s The National aired an in-depth interview with Hill discussing his son’s involvement with Toronto gangs.

In early 2009, Hill published I Am My Father’s Son: A Memoir of Love and Forgiveness ( ISBN 978-1-55468-190-7) which recounts his childhood and his relationship with his prominent father. Like his father, Hill was diagnosed as a diabetic. Hill learned from a doctor before a concert, that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Hill was a lifelong friend of writer Paul Quarrington, and the two also occasionally performed together as a folk music duo, billed as Quarrington/Hill. The pair’s final collaboration, a song about death called “Are You Ready”, was completed just ten days before Quarrington’s death in early 2010, which would be featured in a television documentary, Paul Quarrington: Life in Music.