Heart – Will You Be There (In The Morning)

Heart made an album to prove they could write their own songs again. Its only hit was the one they didn’t write, sung by the sister who usually didn’t sing.

Desire Walks On was supposed to be the record where Ann and Nancy Wilson took Heart back. After eight years of enormous hits written by other people, the sisters co-wrote most of its songs themselves and turned the guitars up again. Then Capitol needed a single for pop radio, and the song chosen was the one track on the album with no Wilson in the credits. Will You Be There (In the Morning) was written by Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the man behind the hit they had come to dislike most, and the voice out front belonged to Nancy, not Ann.

Keep watching: Heart – These Dreams · explore more →

The road to that contradiction started in 1985. Heart’s first album for Capitol produced four Top 10 singles, and the Wilsons had not written the big ones. The pattern held through Bad Animals and Brigade, each built around power ballads supplied from outside. In 1990 one of those songs, Lange’s All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, climbed to No.2 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Its storyline rankled both sisters, and the success of a song they did not care for hardened their wish to choose their own material.

So the eleventh Heart album was meant as a correction. The sisters wrote with their longtime partner Sue Ennis, covered Bob Dylan with Layne Staley of Alice in Chains singing along, and aimed the opening single, Black on Black II, at rock radio. That left the pop audience they had spent eight years building, and for those listeners the label reached for the proven formula. John Purdell and Duane Baron produced the Lange song as a chugging midtempo ballad, with bright guitar chords, glossy keyboards and the two sisters harmonizing on the chorus.

The Other Voice

Putting Nancy in front was the one real surprise. Ann Wilson is among the great rock singers and takes the lead on nearly everything Heart records. Her sister had stepped forward before, most famously on These Dreams, which became the band’s first No.1. Nancy’s voice is lighter and closer, and on this song it changes what the listener hears. A lyric that asks whether a lover will still be around at daybreak could have been belted. She sings it as a question, as if she is not sure of the answer.

The trade press expected it to be huge. Billboard’s reviewer wrote in December 1993 that the single “sounds like a surefire smash.” It did respectable business instead. Capitol issued it in Britain on November 8, 1993, a week ahead of the album, and the Official Charts Company ranked it at No.19. Canada’s RPM chart took it to No.8. In the United States, where it arrived in December, Billboard’s Hot 100 stopped it at No.39, though the Adult Contemporary chart carried it to No.15. The album peaked at No.48.

That No.39 looked like a disappointment then and reads differently now. Heart did not release another studio album until 2004, and they never returned to the Top 40. A run that began with Magic Man in the seventies ended here, with a borrowed song and the quieter sister singing it. The album built to prove Heart could stand on their own writing is mostly remembered for the track that argued the opposite. That is unfair to the record and an accurate picture of 1993, when a veteran Seattle band could still reach pop radio only one way, while a newer Seattle sound took everything else.