Songoftheday 5/4/14 - This bloody road remains a mystery, this sudden darkness fills the air...

Pat Benatar - "Invincible (Theme from the Legend of Billie Jean)"
from the albums Seven The Hard Way (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day is from the biggest female rock star of the 80's, Pat Benatar, whose tamer album Tropico had brought Pat her biggest hit with "We Belong", along with a top-40 follow-up with "The Ooh Ooh Song".  The following year, before the release of what would be her seventh album, Pat contributed a song for the teen-flick The Legend Of Billie Jean, which starred former Supergirl Helen Slater as well as a then-unknown Christian Slater (oddly, not related) along with the future voice of Lisa Simpson Yeardley Smith. The movie was so bad that the idea of the name happening to remind one of the Michael Jackson hit was just one of the small artistic crimes committed. Song doctor Holly Knight and British electropop whiz Simon Climie (eventually half of Climie Fisher) wrote the theme "Invincible", a tight nugget of pop perfection that was produced to a wall of sound effect by Pat's husband and guitarist Neil Geraldo along with Mike Chapman and William Wittman...

"Invincible" became Benatar's fourth top-ten pop hit in America in September of 1985, while scaling to #4 on the Mainstream Rock radio chart in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single did even better in Canada, reaching #6, while going top-20 in the Netherlands and New Zealand, and top-30 in Australia. Most noticably, the song kind of stiffed in England, stalling at #53, while the last two lead-off singles for her made the top-40.

I have to admit that back in the day I would've answered this as my favorite Pat Benatar song. Ahh, I'm such a sucker for an overproduced song.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


...and here's Pat live with "Invincible" in 2001...

Up tomorrow: A seaworthy singer goes for a dubious female.