Love Is A Battlefield

by

Pat Benatar

Album: Live from Earth      Released: 1983

US Chart: 5     UK Chart: 17

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While the 1982 Gap Band hit "You Dropped A Bomb On Me" comes close, no song uses wartime imagery to describe heartbreak quite like "Love Is A Battlefield." The song was written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight. Chapman was an established songwriter and producer, while Knight was a former member of the bands Device and Spider, and was just starting to write songs, something she proved very good at. Says Knight: "I was at his house, I was just starting to write with him, and Pat Benatar called up and said, 'Mike, I would love for you to write me a song. I'm doing an album, will you write me a hit, please?' And he goes, 'Well, I'm here with one of my writers, Holly Knight, and we were just going to sit down and write. So we'll write something for you.' So he hung up, and I started playing the chords to 'Love Is A Battlefield.' He said, 'That's so great, I love that, keep doing that.' He says, 'Now, what we really need' – and this is something I learned from him - 'This song is very catchy, very commercial, let's write something really, really weird on top of it. That'll make it special. And it'll be that much better.' I said, 'Oh, I like it.' He says, 'We're going to write something really sick, like…' and he just spit out 'Love is a battlefield,' as an example. I said, 'Well, that works for me.' And we wrote that song. It was just like free association."

Knight and Chapman wrote this song as more of a ballad, and they were surprised to hear what Benatar did with it. Says Knight: "When Mike and I first heard it we were horrified, we hated it, because it was so different. But then it became such a huge hit, and we had to step out and say, You know, they did a very good rendering of it, and that's how it was meant to be. There's lots of ways you can hear that song, and they're all good."

Brooke White sang this on American Idol in 2008 in a slow version that was a big hit with the judges. Says Knight: "The way she did it is really how it was originally done. It's not that she changed it, she just tapped into the vibe that it was supposed to be. The song was never meant to be a fast upbeat shuffle. And I'm not knocking what Benatar did, because she did a classic version, which I ended up loving." (Thanks to Holly Knight for speaking with us about this song. Her full interview is available in the Songfacts Songwriter Interviews.)

The music video got a great deal of airplay on MTV at a time when all they did was show videos. It contains some very '80s fashion and was one of the first videos to incorporate dialogue into the song to progress the storyline, which was Benatar running away from home and trying to make it on her own (strange that she was still living with her parents at age 30, but she did look young for her age). The video also contained a group dance sequence, which was popularized by Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video earlier in 1983. Benatar was out of her element, as dancing is not her thing, but she pulled off the moves admirably and helped create a very memorable scene.

In 2009, Jordin Sparks paid a certain homage to this song on her track "Battlefield," where she sings: "Why does love always feel like a battlefield."

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Comments:

"The music video got a great deal of airplay on MTV at a time when all they did was show videos." Yeah, it was Music TV, now its just crap
- bunhyung, Poland, ME

I liked what she did with song lyrics: she pushed them to the max, wringing everything she could out of a song. When I think about 80's hits, Pat Benatar always comes to mind.
- Tom, Dozier, AL

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