Songfacts®:

• "Through The Eyes Of Love" was written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager for the 1978 movie Ice Castles, about a figure skater who loses her eyesight after a fall. The movie is a love story, with her boyfriend coaxing her back onto the ice.
  
  Hamlisch is one of the most prominent composers of film music in history. He also worked on the "title track" to the 1973 Barbra Streisand movie The Way We Were. Sung by Streisand, it was a #1 hit. Bayer Sager also co-wrote "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" from 1981. They pair had collaborated before: They teamed to write "Nobody Does It Better" for the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
• Melissa Manchester was a very popular singer in the '70s and early '80s. She co-wrote some of her hits with Carole Bayer Sager, including "Midnight Blue" from 1975. In a Songfacts interview with Manchester, she said Bayer Sager called to offer her the song, but Manchester had to supply the band. She rounded up the musicians she toured and recorded with, went to the studio, and recorded the song. It was used on the soundtrack to Ice Castles and also released as a single.
• Manchester talked about this song's inspiration in her Songfacts interview: "It was particularly poignant to have Marvin explain to me how he was inspired to compose the melody when he and Carol were viewing the film before any music was set to it. It's about an ice skater who goes blind, and he was watching her on the ice doing these figure-eights all by herself in this enormous rink, and he started to hear that opening melody that was reflective to him of her figure-eight. That's how it started to show up.
  
  The thing about songwriting is, you're serving the idea. It's not as if you're writing a concerto where it's all about structure. This is music to serve a literal idea, and you only have three-and-a-half to four minutes to make it worth anybody's while to listen."
• "Through The Eyes Of Love" wasn't a big hit, stalling at #76, but decades later it endures as one of Melissa Manchester's most popular songs. That's partly because it's a very popular wedding song, often used for the first dance.
• The song was nominated for an Academy Award in 1979. The Manchester-sung "I'll Never Say Goodbye" from The Promise was also nominated that year, making her the first singer with two nominated songs, and thus the first singer to perform two of them at one ceremony. "Rainbow Connection" was also nominated, but the winner was "It Goes Like It Goes" from Norma Rae.