It’s time once again to go back to a hotly contested race for a Grammy from years past. The 1986 Song of the Year Grammy category featured five massive hits from the previous year battling it out for the prestigious honor. The trophy went to “We Are The World”, the charity single credited to USA For Africa. But we’re going to go back through the nominees and decide which song was truly deserving.
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“Money For Nothing” by Dire Straits
Mark Knopfler proved with “Money For Nothing” that a good songwriter should always have their antennae out for excellent material. Some workers lugging appliances around a department store were complaining about the rock stars on the televisions surrounding them. Knopfler heard them, borrowed those words, and had some fun at the expense of the MTV generation. The fact that the song benefited from a clever video only heightened the irony of it all.
“I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
Foreigner had discovered with the song “Waiting For A Girl Like You” that lead singer Lou Gramm could caress a ballad as well as he could drive home a rocker. They upped the ante on “I Want To Know What Love Is,” putting Gramm in the middle of a gospel setting and letting him really uncork. Gramm eventually tired of his bandmate Mick Jones’ efforts to soften up Foreigner. But the slow stuff worked to perfection on this one, and it just might have deserved a Grammy in 1986.
“The Boys Of Summer” by Don Henley
Tom Petty often benefited from music written by his Heartbreaker guitarist, Mike Campbell. But he turned down the musical bed that would eventually become “The Boys Of Summer”. Don Henley heard the moody, wistful strains of Campbell’s composition and let that feed into the song that we wrote. Borrowing the title from a classic book about baseball, he penned evocative lyrics about fading romance and broken dreams.
“We Are The World” by USA For Africa
The folks behind USA For Africa deserve everlasting credit for the logistical feat they achieved in bringing so many legends to the recording on somewhat short notice. One wonders what kind of song they might have been able to deliver had there been more time to concentrate on the writing. As it is, “We Are The World”, penned by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, never digs too far into the issue the song is trying to elucidate. This was the one to actually win the 1986 Grammy Award for Song of the Year.
“Everytime You Go Away” by Paul Young
You don’t tend to think of Hall & Oates as album artists. But they usually avoided filler on their LPs. “Everytime You Go Away”, written by Daryl Hall, could be found on their 1980 album Voices. Paul Young found it and used it as his springboard to cross the ocean, taking his success in Great Britain and parlaying it into a chart-topping spot in America. Young matches the potency of Hall’s original vocal, no easy feat.
We’ve already registered our objections with “We Are The World”, so we’re throwing that one out. Both “Everytime You Go Away” and “I Want To Know What Love Is” ride high on the performances of singers delivering songs that are somewhat by the book.
“Money For Nothing” stands out as somewhat comical, but Knopfler’s guitar work is the highlight. We’re choosing “The Boys Of Summer”, a stellar combination of soaring music and piercing lyrics.
Photo by Kevin Kane/Getty Images for Scoop Marketing
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