Songoftheday 7/25/15 - Saw a psychic in LA was just the other day, and she told me what I knew was true...

"Love Power" - Dionne Warwick & Jeffrey Osborne
from the album Reservations For Two (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #12 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's SOTD comes from pop vocal icon Dionne Warwick, who landed the biggest hit of her career with the charity single "That's What Friends Are For", which topped the American singles chart for a month and became the biggest single of 1986. A year later, she released her Reservations For Two album, which included five duets among its ten tracks. One of them, "Love Power", was released as the first single. Written by the legendary duo of Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager, the record features R&B singer Jeffrey Osborne, who had also had the biggest solo hit so far with his "You Should Be Mine (Woo Woo Song)". Dionne even got to slip in a line about psychics, considering her future stint hawking the Psychic Friends Network..

"Love Power" climbed up to the top-20 on the American pop chart in August of 1987 (the single was Osborne's highest-charting pop hit). It would be the last for either Warwick or Osborne to reach the top-40 on the Hot 100. The breezy track (which sounds like the sonic counterpart to Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald's "On My Own") did even better on easy listening radio stations, making it to #1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, and topped out at #5 on their R&B genre chart. Across the pond in England, the single was a minor hit at #63.

Dionne's next single, the title track from the album and another duet this time with producer/singer Kashif, was a minor pop hit at #62 while reaching #7 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #20 R&B. She would have a few more minor soul hits and popped into the Hot 100 chart one more time in 1998 with a cover of "What The World Needs Is Love" (#87), but sadly she was becoming more known to the younger folk as Whitney's aunt that was tied into the Psychic Network (the infomercial was inescapable in the 90s), getting busted for weed at an airport in Hawaii, and going bankrupt in 2002. But her status as a cornerstone of classic pop music from the 60s remains untouched to music fans worldwide.

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Here's Dionne performing the song live in 1987...

Up tomorrow: the Red Rocker steps away from his replacement gig to rhyme a mantra.