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The Demo Nobody Wanted: How Kim Carnes Turned a 1974 Throwaway into the Biggest Song of 1981
The Demo Nobody Wanted: How Kim Carnes Turned a 1974 Throwaway into the Biggest Song of 1981 In March 1981, Kim Carnes walked into a recording studio and cut a song she had initially rejected — a seven-year-old demo that sounded, in her producer’s memorable phrase, like “a Leon Russell track, with this beer-barrel polka…
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Kim Carnes: The Heart Behind the Hits — Sixty Years of Love, Nashville Roots, and Quiet Strength
In an industry famous for burning through marriages the way it burns through singles, Kim Carnes has been married to the same man since 1967. Let that sink in: while the music business was inventing and discarding trends around her — folk, country-rock, disco, new wave, MTV — she went home to Dave Ellingson. Through…
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Mistaken Identity: How Kim Carnes Made an Album That Outshone Its Own Biggest Hit
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…
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The Untold Story of Kim Carnes: The Raspiest Voice in Pop and the Ten-Year Overnight Hit
In the spring of 1981, a strange, smoky voice started pouring out of every radio in America, riding a pulsing synthesizer riff and singing about a long-dead Hollywood star’s eyes. Disc jockeys did double-takes. Callers swore it was Rod Stewart. It wasn’t. It was Kim Carnes — a 35-year-old Los Angeles songwriter who had been…