Songoftheday 4/23/14 - I've been lonely I've been waiting for you, I'm pretending and that's all I can do...

Heart - "What About Love?"
from the album Heart (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12

Today's Song of the Day comes from the classic rock band Heart, whose last appearance as a band on the top-40 when 1985 rolled around was three years prior, when their milquetoast "This Man is Mine" spent a month in the lower reaches of that chart level. After firing the band's rhythm section, their next effort, Passionworks, was artistically more cohesive but it failed to even put a single in the pop top-40, with "How Can I Refuse" coming four notches below that mark. What may have re-piqued interest in the group was Ann Wilson's turn on the Footloose duet "Almost Paradise" with Loverboy's Mike Reno, which made the top-10 on the pop chart in the US in 1984.

 Moving over to Capitol Records, the band, now with the Wilson sisters Ann and Nancy along with longtime guitarist Howard Leese and new drummer Denny Carmassi and bassist Mark Andes, set out to record their first record for the label, a self-titled effort produced by Ron Nevison (The Who, Bad Company). The first single from the project was a song co-written by Bryan Adams' collaborator Jim Vallance and originally recorded by a Canadian rock band named Toronto in 1982...

When that band passed on including the song on their album, it took three years for Heart to get ahold of it and release it as the lead-off 45...

"What About Love?" returned Heart to the pop top-10 in the U.S. for the first time since the beginning of the decade in August of 1985, while climbing to #3 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the single made it to #8 in Canada, and top-40 in Australia. Over in England, where the album's hits didn't get wide notice until a rerelease three years later, the band saw "What About Love" reaching #14 in 1988.

What this single did is establish the band as a "softer" mainstream rock version of their Led Zep-ish previous incarnation, while avoiding the treacle that their early-80s work was pointing to. 

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Here's the sisters and the band live in 1990...

...and again on The Ellen Show in 2011...

...and finally on tour in 2013...

Up tomorrow: the Queen Of Soul goes driving.