Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar

He'd coax rather than demand, ever the consummate coach tasked with convincing me that I had it in me all along.' 'We'd duke it out, eventually coming to some kind of compromise, but he was always gentle and subtle.

'Sometimes he wanted vocal performances that were so physically difficult I'd cut a session off abruptly and storm out,' she wrote. Giraldo heard out Benatar when she complained about the keys certain songs were written in, but most times he would impress on her to dig down and reach for those notes. Watch Pat Benatar's Video for 'Anxiety (Get Nervous)' I kept saying, 'Come on, this is easy in the studio – but what about when I'm running around onstage?'' 'He pushed me every step of the way, keeping my voice high and powerful,' she recalled in the memoir.

People demand that.'īack in the studio, Benatar noticed a difference in how Giraldo produced her vocal performances. If an artist changes lyrics or adds musical licks, the artist is credited. 'We did get paid for our work but got none of the credit for being writers on a monstrous hit. Benatar agreed to record it, but with a caveat.ĭrummer 'Myron and I rewrote many of the lyrics to make it work for me,' she said in Between a Heart and a Rock Place. One song on which such embellishment yielded something truly special was ' Shadows of the Night,' a David Leigh Byron-penned track that Rachel Sweet had recorded a year earlier. We wanted to create art in musical form that belonged to us – not simply embellish someone else's ideas.' Our goal was to keep honing those skills so that we could record songs that had relevance to our situation. 'We weren't opposed to considering outside material,' Benatar wrote in her memoir, 'but by this time we were writing a lot of good songs ourselves. They come up with four songs that Benatar and her band began recording immediately, including three of the five tracks on the album's first side: 'Anxiety (Get Nervous), 'Fight It Out,' and 'The Victim.'Ĭhrysalis continued to pitch other songwriters. Songwriter Billy Steinberg returned to work with Giraldo, have already written the title track of Benatar's previous album, Precious Time. He'd found ways to technically implant what we heard and felt artistically.'īenatar also had a brace of quality songs to begin working on. Peter had no ego issues, and he was genuinely interested in helping us put on tape what we envisioned. There'd been no worries about looking foolish or making a mistake. 'On In the Heat of the Night, he'd created an atmosphere of limitless creative freedom and given us confidence in our own abilities. 'As a producer, we knew Peter to be a patient and inspiring teacher,' Benatar said in her 2010 memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place.

Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar