Songoftheday 9/12/12 - Love is believin' but you let me down, how can I love you when you ain't around?

Dionne Warwick - "Heartbreaker"
from the album Heartbreaker (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (two weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 13

Today's Song of the Day is by the iconic interpretive vocalist Dionne Warwick, who was discovered by songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David in the early sixties. The New Jersey native released her first single, "Don't Make Me Over" in 1962, and the song became her first top-40 pop single and top-5 on the R&B chart. Continuing under the songwriting duo's aegis at Scepter Records, Warwick would go on to score her first top-10 pop and adult-contemporary hit the next year with the classic "Anyone Who Had A Heart". That single's followup, "Walk On By", was her first to break the top-10 in Britain (it also topped the Cash Box R&B chart, during the period Billboard didn't run a chart).

She spent the 60s releasing awesome record after the next, with Bacharach & David's "Message To Michael" becoming her first top-10 in Canada in 1966, and "I Say A Little Prayer" getting her to the US pop top-5 for the first time the next year. The "B-side" to that single, "Theme from Valley Of The Dolls", just missed the #1 position, and was her highest Billboard-charting single of the 60's - even though it wasn't written by the mentoring duo. Dionne closed out the decade with her first #1 on the adult-contemporary radio chart, "I'll Never Fall In Love Again".

After Bacharach and David split, Warwick left Scepter records in the early seventies for Warner Brothers (whilst temporarily adding an "e" to her name), and stayed there for a relatively less successful six years. The one shining point in that period, however, was her collaboration with the vocal group the Spinners, "Then Came You", which became her first #1 single in 1974.

In 1979, Dionne moved over to Arista Records, where she teamed up with producer/singer/superstar Barry Manilow, who helmed her Dionne album, giving her a "comeback" top-5 pop hit "I'll Never Love This Way Again", her first since "Then Came You" five years prior.

Warwick released two albums in 1982; the first, Friends In Love, gave her another top-40 hit with the title track, a duet with Johnny Mathis. The second, Heartbreaker, was produced by Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees along with collaborators Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson, who did Barbra Streisand's Guilty album in 1980. Most of the album was written by the three Gibb brothers, like the title track, released as the lead-off single...

"Heartbreaker" returned Dionne to the US pop top 10, while topping the adult-contemporary (soft-rock) chart and making the US R&B top-20. It was also big down under, going to #2 in Australia (her biggest hit up to that point), as her album was her highest charting ever in the UK at #3.

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In 2001 the Bee Gees released their own version of the song for their For The Record retrospective...

Three years later, Japanese singer Inagaki Junichi covered the song in his own language, sounding like an Asian Enrique Iglesias...

In 2005, German pop-reggae group Blue Lagoon reached the top 40 in Austria, Hungary, and their home country with their take on the track..

...lastly, British rapper Lowkey chopped and screwed up the backing track for his "Alphabeat Assassin" in 2011..

And for the heck of it, here's the original Bee Gees production from Dionne's album...

Up tomorrow: an operatic rock singer nabs a Grammy in the evening hours...