Ask anyone to hum the Flashdance soundtrack and you will get two No. 1 singles: Irene Cara riding the audition of her life, Michael Sembello running with the Maniac. But the film’s beating heart is neither of them. It is a slow, smoky ballad that plays while the heroine sits alone with her grief and her doubts — a song written to order by Kim Carnes, folded into one of the best-selling soundtrack albums ever made, and then, in one of the stranger decisions of the era, never released as a single at all. I’ll Be Here Where the Heart Is became a Grammy-winning album track, a favourite of Tina Turner’s stage show, and the great overlooked record of Carnes’s career, all without troubling the singles chart it might have climbed.
Phil Ramone Finds His Ballad
Flashdance was assembled like a jukebox with a plot: a welder in Pittsburgh who dances in a bar at night and dreams of the ballet. Its music supervisor was Phil Ramone, the Grammy-winning producer — credited among the album’s producers as well as its musical curator — who believed every song in a film had to earn its scene. Ramone had the set pieces covered — Giorgio Moroder’s title song, Sembello’s Maniac — but the film had one hole in it. Before Alex Owens could dance her audition, she had to be seen at her lowest: alone in the aftermath of her mentor Hannah’s death, wondering whether the dream was worth it. That passage needed a ballad, and Ramone knew whose voice he wanted.
He and Carnes had been friends for years. As Carnes later told it, Ramone came to her with a simple invitation: come and see a rough cut of the film, and write something for it. She watched the film, saw exactly where the one ballad belonged, and wrote it. Ramone’s verdict, in her recollection, was that it was perfect.
Written With Her Own Band
Carnes did not write the song alone, or with soundtrack mercenaries. Her co-writers were Craig Krampf and Duane Hitchings, the drummer and keyboard player from her own working band — the same musicians who had powered the Mistaken Identity and Voyeur sessions, and who would shape her next album too. The record was produced by Keith Olsen, and it is built to showcase the tender register of the most recognisable rasp in pop. Where Bette Davis Eyes had made that voice sound sly and haunted, this song lets it sound simply devoted: a promise, sung by a woman who has heard every reason to leave. It is worth remembering where she stood when she wrote it — two years past the biggest record of 1981, with the industry waiting to see whether the rasp had been a novelty. A film ballad, written with her own band for a friend’s movie, was not the obvious next move. It turned out to be one of her best.
Giorgio Moroder, the film’s composer and the soundtrack’s presiding genius, later said that Carnes put all her heart into the song and that it showed the tender side of her voice. The two were hardly strangers to each other’s world: Carnes’s previous album, Voyeur, had taken her into dark synth-pop territory that Moroder himself acknowledged drew on his productions, so the Flashdance call brought together a singer and a sound that were already circling each other. In the film the song plays across the saddest passage in the picture — Alex alone after Hannah’s death, gathering up her mentor’s belongings and her own nerve — the held breath before the finale, and the moment the whole story turns on. Ramone, who wrote in his autobiography that a successful musical needs a reason for every song, had found his reason: before the audience could be asked to cheer the audition, it had to sit with the girl who might not survive it.
A Soundtrack That Ate the Charts
The Flashdance album was released by Casablanca Records on April 11, 1983, four days before the film opened, to expectations so low that PolyGram initially shipped only sixty thousand copies. They vanished. Retailers took orders for half a million more within ten days, audiences were reported dancing in cinema aisles, and the album spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — briefly pushing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album of the age, out of the top spot. It has since sold six million copies in the United States alone and some twenty million worldwide.
The awards followed the same curve. The soundtrack collected nine Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year, and won three — among them Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture, an award that went to all of the album’s credited songwriters, Carnes included. It was her second Grammy, two years after Bette Davis Eyes had taken Record of the Year. By any reasonable accounting, the ballad she had written to fill one quiet scene was now part of a phenomenon.
The Hit That Was Never a Single
And yet radio never got its own copy. The soundtrack’s singles were Flashdance… What a Feeling, Maniac, Lady, Lady, Lady and Manhunt — Carnes’s ballad was not among them. The reason, as she explained it years later, was label geometry. She was an EMI America artist; the soundtrack belonged to Casablanca. Casablanca was in the business of selling the album, not building a rival label’s singer, and EMI had no stake in pushing a track it did not own. Caught between the two, with Casablanca’s president Russ Regan in her corner, she said, the label still was not permitted to release I’ll Be Here Where the Heart Is as a single in the American market, and so a song millions of people knew from the film and the album simply had no chart life of its own. It is the purest example in her catalogue of the difference between being heard and being promoted: in 1983, almost nobody in America escaped Flashdance, and almost nobody could buy its best ballad as a record of hers.
The song found its public anyway. Carnes placed it on her own album, Café Racers, later in 1983 — an album whose lead single, the synth-driven Invisible Hands, earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, and whose success kept her on the radio while the ballad stayed home. In America the ballad’s only appearance on a single came quietly, as the B-side of Invisible Hands — a hiding place for a song that deserved better. And Tina Turner — then rebuilding herself into the biggest live act in the world — took it into her concert set on her mid-eighties tours, singing it, Carnes said with evident pride, with all her heart. Retrospective rankings of the Flashdance album have a way of agreeing with Turner: the ballad is routinely placed second only to the title song among the soundtrack’s tracks, ahead of records that were actually released and actually charted.
The Quiet Centre Holds
There is a pleasing symmetry in where the song ended up. Flashdance survives as a time capsule of synths, legwarmers and montage, and its two No. 1s are period pieces, however beloved. Carnes’s ballad, the track that was never a single, is the one moment in the film that behaves like an ordinary great pop song — no routine, no audition, just a voice making a promise in a quiet room. It won her a Grammy, it earned Tina Turner’s admiration, and it did all of it from the middle of somebody else’s blockbuster. Two years later the industry acknowledged the voice in another way, handing Carnes a place in the We Are the World session, where she can be heard singing in the bridge alongside Huey Lewis and Cyndi Lauper — three of the most distinctive rasps and wails of the decade, stacked into a single line of the biggest charity record ever made. Some records need the chart. This one only ever needed the scene.
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