Everybody knows “Bette Davis Eyes.” It was the biggest single of 1981, nine weeks at number one, a Grammy Record of the Year, the song that made Kim Carnes’ raspy voice one of the most recognizable sounds on earth. But here is the thing about Mistaken Identity, the album that contained it: the album is better than the single. Recorded in less than a month at the turn of 1980 into 1981, it is a taut, moody, impeccably crafted record — a synth-rock noir full of desperate characters and late-night confessions, cut by some of the finest session players Los Angeles ever produced. It spent four weeks at number one, went platinum, and was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year. And then, like so many great albums swallowed by their own biggest hit, it faded into the shadow of its most famous three minutes and forty-seven seconds. This is the story of the album behind the phenomenon.
The Raspy Voice in the Room
By December 1980, Kim Carnes was 35 years old and had been in the music business for nearly two decades — as a member of the New Christy Minstrels, the folk group where she met her future husband, as one half of a duo with Dave Ellingson, as a songwriter whose compositions were recorded by others, and as one of Los Angeles’ most in-demand demo singers, the voice on countless songwriters’ tapes. She had released a string of solo albums that showcased her extraordinary voice — that sandpaper-and-honey rasp, utterly unlike anyone else’s — without quite breaking through. She was, in industry terms, a lifer: respected, employed, and invisible.
What changed was confidence — and a calling card. In 1980, just before the Mistaken Identity sessions, Carnes had scored a Top 5 hit duetting with Kenny Rogers on “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.” Suddenly the industry knew her name, or at least her voice. She walked into Record One in Los Angeles on December 15, 1980, not as a newcomer hoping for a hit but as a veteran who knew precisely what she wanted: a record that sounded like the inside of her head — tough, romantic, a little dangerous.
Record One: Twenty-Nine Days
Mistaken Identity was recorded between December 15, 1980, and January 12, 1981 — twenty-nine days, start to finish. The producer was Val Garay, a brilliant engineer-turned-producer who understood how to make records that sounded expensive and felt intimate. Garay assembled a crack band of Los Angeles session aces: Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar on guitars, Bill Cuomo on keyboards, Craig Krampf on drums, Bryan Garofalo on bass, Daniel Moore contributing, and the Waters sisters — Maxine and Julia — on backing vocals, the same voices that graced a hundred classic records.
The chemistry was immediate. This was a band of players who had made hundreds of records together in various combinations, and they locked in with Carnes’ voice like they’d been touring with her for years. The sound they created was distinctive: rock guitars with new-wave edges, synthesizers used for atmosphere rather than gimmickry, and above it all that voice — world-weary, defiant, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s.
The Sound of Record One
Part of what makes Mistaken Identity special is the room it was made in — and the people in the room. Val Garay was one of the great engineer-producers of the era, a man who understood that a record should sound like a place. Record One, his studio, was state of the art without being sterile, and the album breathes with its atmosphere: close-miked drums, guitars with real air around them, and Carnes’ voice right up front, every rasp and breath audible.
The players deserve their own roll call. Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar were the twin guitar slingers of the seventies Los Angeles scene — between them they’d played with Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and half of Laurel Canyon. Craig Krampf’s drumming gave the record its heartbeat. And the Waters sisters, Maxine and Julia, wrapped Carnes’ lead vocals in backing harmonies so rich they felt like velvet. This was the A-team, and they played like it.
The Single That Ate the Album
We have to talk about “Bette Davis Eyes,” because the album can’t be understood without it — but briefly, because its full story belongs elsewhere. The song, written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, had been floating around for years. Carnes heard it, claimed it, and with Garay built the spare, hypnotic arrangement around Bill Cuomo’s famous synthesizer riff. It ran just 3:47, and it sounded like nothing else on the radio.
Released as the album’s first single, it didn’t just succeed — it detonated. Nine weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The biggest single of 1981. Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It made Carnes a star at 35, an age when the industry usually stops returning women’s calls — proof that talent doesn’t expire on schedule. And it created a problem: from that moment on, Mistaken Identity would always be “the ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ album,” and everything else on it would have to fight for air.
“Draw of the Cards”: The Other Single
The album’s second single deserved better than it got. “Draw of the Cards,” co-written by Carnes with Cuomo, Ellingson, and Garay, is a dramatic, cinematic rocker — all pounding piano, slashing guitars, and Carnes’ voice at its most commanding, swooping from a near-whisper to a full-throated wail. The title phrase came to her during a visit to a hospitalized guitarist friend, a moment of real-life drama that bled straight into the song — you can hear the hospital-room urgency in every bar. It climbed to number 28 on the Hot 100 — respectable, but a fraction of what it deserved.
The video, directed by a young Russell Mulcahy — who would go on to define the visual style of the MTV era with Duran Duran’s exotic mini-epics — was suitably surreal: Carnes as a kind of noir fortune-teller, all shadows and angles, dealing cards in a smoky void. It was striking, strange, and utterly of its moment.
Listening now, “Draw of the Cards” sounds like the hit that should have been. It has the drama, the hook, the voice. But in the spring of 1981, radio only wanted one Kim Carnes song, and it already had it.
“Hit and Run” and the DeShannon Connection
One of the album’s buried treasures is “Hit and Run,” written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon — the same songwriting team behind “Bette Davis Eyes.” DeShannon, a formidable artist in her own right (“What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”), had a special chemistry with Carnes: both were strong women with distinctive voices who’d had to fight for every inch of respect in a male-dominated business. “Hit and Run” is tougher than “Bette Davis Eyes,” a new-wave-tinged rocker with a biting lyric and a chorus that sticks like a burr.
The presence of two Weiss-DeShannon songs on the album is no accident. Carnes recognized kindred spirits: writers who understood that pop music could have claws. “Hit and Run” never became a single, which is a shame — it’s one of the album’s sharpest moments, and it hints at the harder-edged direction Carnes would explore on later records.
The Title Track
The album’s title song, “Mistaken Identity,” was written by Carnes herself, and it’s the record’s emotional center. A moody, mid-tempo meditation on being misread and misunderstood, it plays like a mission statement from a woman who had spent twenty years in the music business without quite being seen. The lyric’s ambiguity is its power: is it about a lover, the industry, or herself? Probably all three.
Carnes has always been a better songwriter than she’s given credit for — the industry prefers its female stars to be interpreters — and “Mistaken Identity” is the proof. It’s sophisticated, unresolved, and quietly devastating. She co-wrote much of the album, and her fingerprints are all over its attitude: the refusal to be a victim, the insistence on complexity. In a just world, the title track would be as famous as the album’s big single. In this world, it’s a secret handshake among fans — the song you play for people to prove there’s more to Kim Carnes than they think.
Four Weeks at Number One
The numbers, for the record: Mistaken Identity reached number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for four weeks. It went platinum. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year — and on Grammy night, Carnes didn’t go home empty-handed: “Bette Davis Eyes” won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year, the songwriting Grammy going to Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon. For a 35-year-old woman who had spent twenty years as the music business’s best-kept secret, it was vindication beyond dreaming.
In the summer of 1981, Carnes mounted the Mistaken Identity Summer Tour, running from August through October — her first headlining tour, with Gary U.S. Bonds as support. She was 35 years old, two decades into her career, and finally, unmistakably, a star.
The tour was a triumph, but it also revealed the trap. Audiences came for “Bette Davis Eyes,” and Carnes — a proud album artist who’d waited twenty years for this moment — had to win them over to the rest of the record night after night. She did, because the songs were that good and the voice was that commanding — night after night, city after city, she turned casual hit-seekers into believers. But the industry had already decided what her story was: one-hit wonder with a weird voice. It would take years — and a move to Nashville, and a whole second career as a songwriter — to complicate that narrative.
Put Mistaken Identity on today and the surprise is how cohesive it is. This isn’t a singles collection with filler; it’s a world — a late-night Los Angeles of neon and heartbreak, rendered in synthesizer hum and guitar bite. The production, by Garay and the Record One crew, has aged beautifully: the synthesizers sound atmospheric rather than dated, the guitars still bite, and Carnes’ voice remains one of the great instruments in pop history, a rasp that could strip paint or break your heart, sometimes in the same line. “Bette Davis Eyes” may have been the key that opened the door, but the room beyond it is full of treasures. Twenty-nine days in a Los Angeles studio, four weeks at number one, and a lifetime of proof that Kim Carnes was never a one-song singer. She was, and is, the genuine article, full stop.
Leave a Reply