A singer does their best to keep their voice in pristine shape to enjoy a long, fruitful career. The thought of surgery that might affect the tone and quality of the voice has to be a harrowing one for a singer.
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For the Welsh chanteuse Bonnie Tyler, surgery did transform her voice, but that only boosted her career prospects. The 1978 single “It’s A Heartache” showcased the change and became a worldwide hit.
Tyler’s Trajectory
Born as Gaynor Hopkins in Wales in 1951, Tyler started up her singing career at the end of the 60s. She found her talent as a child while she was singing in church. Once she pursued music as a career, she followed the path of many up-and-coming singers, touring bars and nightclubs in search of a break.
She was serving as a backing vocalist in a club in 1975 when she was first offered the chance to record, which is also when she adopted her stage name. Not long after that, she was recording singles for RCA Records. As the label put a bit of promotion behind her, her level of success began to rise. That included a couple of charting hits in different locations around the world.
Her debut album, The World Starts Tonight, arrived in early 1977. It was also around that time that the years of non-stop singing live caught up with her. She needed surgery to correct vocal cord issues. Her doctors told her to rest up her vocals, but she couldn’t quite follow that advice to the letter. That led to a vocal transformation.
“Heartache” Creation
Tyler has told the story that, while on vocal rest, she once let out a frustrated scream. Whether or not that might have been the cause, when she began singing again, her voice had taken on an unmistakable rasp. The new vocal tone allowed her to stand out from her peers. When you heard Tyler’s voice, you couldn’t confuse it for anybody else’s.
Her managers, Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe, wrote much of her original material. They penned “It’s A Heartache” for Tyler to record on her second studio album, Natural Force. Tyler released it as a standalone single to be released in November 1977 ahead of the album.
It wasn’t long before other artists were covering this well-written track. But none of them stood a chance of succeeding with the song above Tyler, who gave it an impassioned performance. “It’s A Heartache” put Tyler in the Top 5 in both the US and the UK.
Behind the Lyrics of “It’s A Heartache”
“It’s A Heartache” doesn’t waste any time getting to the painful gist of the matter. “It’s a heartache,” Tyler complains at the start. “Nothing but a heartache/Hits you when it’s too late/Hits you when you’re down.”
She later bemoans that it’s a “fool’s game” that leaves you “feeling like a clown.” Her laments seem to be nothing more than an exercise in catharsis. “It ain’t wise to need someone,” she explains. “As much as I depended on you.”
Bonnie Tyler used “It’s A Heartache” as a kind of test balloon for the biggest hit of her career, a similarly garment-rending lament called “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”. In both cases, the rasp of her voice proved the ideal vehicle to evoke desperate heartbreak.
Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
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