In the winter of 1978, Chic were the most elegant hit machine in disco. Their second album, C’est Chic, contained Le Freak, the biggest-selling single in Atlantic Records’ history, and the world’s dancefloors had surrendered. Yet when musicians argue about the band’s finest record, many of them walk straight past the hit and choose the album’s other single: I Want Your Love, a slow-building, strings-drenched plea sung by Alfa Anderson, which Rolling Stone said builds and builds “until the track practically levitates”.
The song has one of the strangest origin stories in the Chic catalogue. Its melody arrived complete in a dream. And it very nearly was not a Chic record at all — it was written into a swap that sent it one way and a different classic the other. What follows is how a dream, a trade and six minutes of perfectly engineered yearning produced the most argued-over record the band ever made.
The Melody in the Dream
Nile Rodgers has told the story himself, on his blog and in a 2015 interview with Uncut. Rodgers kept score paper by his bed for exactly this eventuality. One night he dreamt the melody of I Want Your Love — not a fragment or a hook, but the whole thing, note for note — and woke up able to write out the complete score before the dream could evaporate. Composers are supposed to embellish stories like this, but Rodgers insists the finished record is the dream transcribed: in the studio, the only change he and Bernard Edwards made to what he had written in the night was to move the strings up an octave in the song’s second half, so the arrangement lifts exactly where a dancer needs it to.
It is a very Chic kind of miracle. This was a band run like a couture house — Rodgers and Edwards writing, producing, arranging and playing, with every element specified — and even their moments of inspiration arrived in full notation. The dream supplied the melody; the Chic Organization supplied everything else.
There is a pleasing logic to the song arriving this way. Rodgers’s guitar style — the percussive, muted “chucking” that chops chords into pure rhythm — treats melody as something physical, something the body knows before the mind does. A tune that came to him in his sleep, complete, is simply that philosophy taken literally: the body composed it while the critic was off duty. Edwards, the partnership’s anchor, then did what he always did, building a bass part that turned Rodgers’s melody into an engine for the dancefloor.
The Great Chic–Sister Sledge Swap
The second twist is that I Want Your Love was originally slated for somebody else. Rodgers and Edwards were simultaneously producing Sister Sledge’s album We Are Family, and the Chic Organization’s songs were, to a degree, interchangeable parts in one elegant machine. According to Kathy Sledge, I Want Your Love was meant for Sister Sledge — and the proof is still audible on the finished record, because Sister Sledge’s background vocals remain on Chic’s version. In exchange, Sister Sledge recorded He’s the Greatest Dancer, a song that had been intended for Chic. That half of the bargain became a Top 10 American hit in the spring of 1979, powering the We Are Family album that made the sisters stars.
Both halves of the trade became classics, which tells you something about the depth of Rodgers and Edwards’s writing in those months: they could give away a song like I Want Your Love as a consolation and still keep a masterpiece. But the swap also means the record carries a ghost of its other life — four sisters from Philadelphia singing behind Alfa Anderson on a song that was supposed to be theirs.
Context matters here. In 1978 and 1979, Rodgers and Edwards were not merely running a band; as the Chic Organization they were the most sought-after writer-producers in dance music, soon to give Diana Ross the biggest album of her career with Diana and its single Upside Down. Songs flowed between their projects because the projects were, in effect, one project — a sound of clipped rhythm guitar, dancing bass and strings arranged like architecture, applied to whoever happened to be in the studio that week.
Six Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds of Lift
Chic recorded the song in 1978 at the Power Station in New York City, the studio whose room sound underpins half the era’s great dance records. Rodgers and Edwards wrote and produced it; Alfa Anderson, the band’s most emotive singer, took the solo lead vocal, and she delivers the title line as pure yearning, held back against the groove rather than shouted over it. Anderson had stepped forward after the departure of original lead singer Norma Jean Wright, and C’est Chic is substantially her showcase: it is her voice, too, carrying the verses of Le Freak, which makes I Want Your Love the record where her instrument receives the full six-minute setting it deserved. The album version runs six minutes and fifty-five seconds — disco as architecture, the famous four-note riff cycling underneath horns and strings — while the single edit, released on 29 January 1979 with (Funny) Bone on the B-side, compressed the build into three minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
The critics noticed the engineering. Cash Box praised the arrangement, tubular bells and all, and AllMusic later called the record a “timeless floor-filler” and a “sonic masterpiece”, judging it frequently better than Le Freak itself — high praise for a song that was never even the biggest hit on its own album.
Charts, Verdicts and a Long Afterlife
The charts, in fact, treated it handsomely. I Want Your Love reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart in November 1978, before its single release; it climbed to No. 5 on the Hot R&B chart in April 1979 and No. 7 on the Hot 100 in May, spending nineteen weeks on the chart, and it was certified Gold in the United States. In Britain it reached No. 4 — to this day, Chic’s highest-charting single there, higher even than Le Freak.
The comparison with Le Freak has haunted the song from the start: it was the follow-up, the album-mate, the record the band’s champions always had to argue for. Time has been kind to the argument. Le Freak remains the bigger monument, but I Want Your Love is the connoisseur’s Chic — the record other musicians name, the one whose arrangement gets studied, the one that proved the band’s range extended to longing as convincingly as it extended to celebration.
The afterlife has been generous, too. Jody Watley took the song back to No. 1 on the American dance chart in 2007, in a version produced by DJ Spinna with Rodgers himself guesting on guitar — the dreamer returning to his own dream, three decades on. In 2015, Lady Gaga performed a new version of the song for a Tom Ford campaign, introducing the riff to a fashion audience Chic would have appreciated. And night after night, the current edition of Nile Rodgers & Chic still plays it, the strings’ octave leap still landing like a small fireworks display.
That the song survives every change of fashion is partly down to its construction. It never shouts its hook; the four-note riff simply accumulates meaning as the strings climb, so the record works at conversation volume and at festival volume, in a club in 1979 and in a fashion film in 2015. Disco was supposed to be disposable. I Want Your Love was built, like everything Rodgers and Edwards made, to couture standards — and couture keeps.
Rodgers wrote plenty of songs at his desk, in studios, on tour buses. I Want Your Love he simply woke up with — and then, in the most Chic move imaginable, very nearly gave it away.
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