Chicago – Hard Habit To Break

Bill Champlin called the songwriter the night before the session and asked him to write a second verse. The result is the record David Foster has spent forty years calling the most perfect production of his career.

Bill Champlin was newly in Chicago when he placed the call. The San Francisco-born vocalist and keyboard player had joined the band in 1981 — recruited specifically by producer David Foster to fill the gap that Peter Cetera could not stretch into on a horn-and-keys arrangement — and by the early winter of 1984 he had been working through Foster’s studio template for the better part of three years. The track Foster wanted to cut next was a song Steve Kipner and John Lewis Parker had written and submitted to the band a few months earlier: a slow, harmonically complicated breakup ballad called “Hard Habit to Break.” Champlin liked the song. He had a problem with the structure. As written, the song moved from a single Cetera verse straight into the chorus, then repeated. There was no second verse — nothing distinct for Champlin to sing. He picked up the phone and called Kipner. “Before we recorded,” Champlin later told Parade, “I called him up and said, ‘Can we get a second verse?'” Kipner wrote one. The second verse — the section that opens with “You found someone else, you had every reason / You know I can’t blame you for runnin’ to him” — is the section Champlin sings, on the studio recording and on every version since.

The Chicago that recorded the song was three years into one of the most successful reinventions in American rock. The band that Robert Lamm, Peter Cetera, James Pankow, Terry Kath, Walter Parazaider, Lee Loughnane, and Danny Seraphine had formed at DePaul University and the American Conservatory in 1967 had spent the first decade of their career as a politically charged jazz-rock outfit — twelve consecutive platinum or multi-platinum albums between 1969 and 1977, more than two dozen Top 40 singles, an industrial-grade horn arrangement that the band’s three brass players had developed into the most distinctive sound in seventies American rock. Then Terry Kath died at the start of 1978, the result of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot at a Los Angeles party; the band’s previous producer James William Guercio had drifted out before the funeral; and through the early eighties Chicago had been trying to find an arrangement that could survive Kath’s absence without sliding into pop irrelevance. Foster arrived in 1982 to produce Chicago 16, replaced the band’s existing horn-led template with synthesizers and slick orchestration, and steered the band toward a softer, ballad-forward direction that the founding members had not asked for but could not argue with once “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” went to US No. 1.

The studio where Foster made the record he still cites

“Hard Habit to Break” was tracked across three Los Angeles rooms during the Chicago 17 sessions of mid-1983 through early 1984 — Foster’s home base, The Lighthouse in North Hollywood; Sunset Sound in Hollywood; and The Record Plant on Third Street. Foster produced and arranged. Jeremy Lubbock arranged the orchestral parts. Humberto Gatica, Foster’s longtime engineer, ran the desk. The session band Foster assembled was the same A-list studio roster that ran through the rest of Chicago 17: Steve Lukather and Carlos Vega from Toto on guitars and percussion at certain points; Foster’s regular keyboard programmers handling the synthesizers; Loughnane, Pankow, and Parazaider on the horn parts that Foster had been told to keep to a minimum. The signal chain was built around a vintage Steinway concert grand that Foster played the opening verse on. Cetera’s lead vocal was tracked through a Neumann U67. Champlin’s was tracked through the same chain on a separate pass. The harmony arrangement — Cetera’s tenor against Champlin’s lower-register soul vocal — is the structural detail the entire record turns on.

The single was released on July 18, 1984, three months after Chicago 17 hit the shelves, as the album’s second single behind “Stay the Night.” It climbed the Billboard Hot 100 across the back half of the year and peaked at No. 3 on the chart dated November 17, 1984. The two records above it stayed above it for the entire run: Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run)” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” the latter the year-end Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 of 1984. The Chicago single was held at No. 3 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart for the same reason. It reached No. 8 in the United Kingdom — Chicago’s biggest UK chart entry in seven years. The 27th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1985 brought four nominations for the song specifically: Record of the Year, Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Best Vocal Arrangement for Two or More Voices (Cetera and Foster), and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s) (Foster and Lubbock). Foster and Lubbock won the last of those. Chicago 17 took home Producer of the Year (Foster, tied with Lionel Richie and James Anthony Carmichael) and Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical (Gatica). The album was certified six times platinum in the United States by the end of 1985.

Leslie Libman’s video and the soundstage that played in the dark

The music video on this page is the official Rhino-channel upload of the original 1984 clip, directed by Leslie Libman — the New York director who had directed the band’s “Stay the Night” video earlier in the year and would shortly direct “You’re the Inspiration” as well. Libman built the “Hard Habit to Break” video around a single visual decision: the band performs in low-key sound-stage lighting, shot in shadow and silhouette, while documentary-style footage of three women navigating the aftermath of separate breakups plays intercut throughout. The band rarely appears in the same frame as the women. The cuts get progressively closer as the song builds. Chicago, by 1984, were not MTV stars in the way Duran Duran or Cyndi Lauper were — they were a band approaching their twentieth year, with members in their late thirties and a horn section the network’s young directors did not know what to do with. Libman’s video worked precisely because it kept the band in the dark and let the song’s emotional architecture carry the visual. The result was a clip that MTV played in heavy rotation through the autumn of 1984 and that has now passed twelve million views on the Rhino channel alone.

Cetera left Chicago for a solo career in July 1985, four months after the Grammy ceremony, after a dispute about touring schedules, vocal billing, and the band’s future direction. The 1986 follow-up Chicago 18 had Jason Scheff replacing him on bass and lead tenor vocals; Foster stayed on through that record and then handed the production chair to Chas Sandford for Chicago 19. Champlin remained until 2009 and continued to sing “Hard Habit to Break” at every Chicago show through his entire run. The band that Robert Lamm had co-founded in 1967 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2016. Cetera, Lamm, and Pankow were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2017 for their songwriting contributions to the catalogue. In April 2026, Lee Loughnane confirmed to Rolling Stone that both Lamm and Pankow had officially retired as touring members of Chicago, after fifty-nine years; Loughnane, the trumpeter who has been with the band since the original 1967 lineup, continues to tour with a roster of post-2010s additions including drummer Walfredo Reyes Jr., saxophonist Ray Herrmann, vocalist Neil Donell, and bassist Eric Baines. The Vegas residency at the Venetian Theatre, which the band opened in 2018, runs for a ninth consecutive year in 2026.

Foster has been asked repeatedly across the four decades since the recording about which of the songs in his catalogue he considers the high-water mark. He has produced records for Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Andrea Bocelli, Michael Bublé, Madonna, and Mariah Carey, won sixteen Grammy Awards across the same period, and been nominated forty-seven times. When the drummer Vinnie Colaiuta asked him on a podcast which of his productions he was most proud of, Foster’s answer was specific. “Hard Habit to Break” was, in his words, “the most perfect record, or close to perfect, that I produced.” The song that had needed a second verse before Champlin could sing on it had become, for the producer who had built Chicago’s eighties reinvention, the one he could not improve.