Chaka Khan, arguably best known for her Prince-penned hit single I Feel For You (but who has a celebrated career spanning half a century) is the voice you can hear in the chorus of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love (arguably giving us a glimpse of how compelling this very whitest of MOR hits could potentially sound). Once you hear her, you can’t imagine how you never recognised her voice in the first place.
More interesting that that, however, is the fact that another iconic MOR hit—Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love—was originally intended to be a duet with Chaka Khan. It’s hard to imagine how Addicted To Love could be improved, mostly because it’s so indelibly etched in commercial music history, but I suspect we’ve been deprived of something even more remarkable here.
(I’ve picked up a lot of really interesting factoids reading through Tom Breihan’s very excellent Number Ones series, in which he has pledged to write a post on every single song that has reached number one on the Billboard chart. I highly recommend bookmarking it for a rainy day (or several.)
#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.