Laura Branigan – The Power of Love

Three completely different songs from the 1980s are all called “The Power of Love” — and the one Laura Branigan sang isn’t the Huey Lewis hit, but a European blockbuster written in Germany that most Americans never heard in its original form.

Say “The Power of Love” to anyone who lived through the 1980s and you’ll get three different answers, because there are three completely different hit songs by that name. There’s the Huey Lewis and the News rocker from Back to the Future. There’s the Frankie Goes to Hollywood ballad. And there’s the soaring power ballad co-written and first recorded by Jennifer Rush — a song so big in Europe it became the best-selling UK single of its year, yet so overlooked in America that most listeners met it through other singers. Laura Branigan’s 1987 version is that third song. Not the Huey Lewis one. The Jennifer Rush one.

Keep watching: Jennifer Rush – The Power of Love (the original of this song) · Huey Lewis – The Power of Love (a different song entirely)

The confusion is real enough that it shaped the record industry’s own decisions. When the Australian duo Air Supply released their cover of the Jennifer Rush song in 1985, they retitled it “The Power of Love (You Are My Lady)” for exactly one reason: the Huey Lewis single was climbing the American chart at the same moment, and nobody wanted two identically named songs competing in the same week. That’s how crowded this title got. Branigan, recording two years later, kept the name simple — just “Power of Love” — and trusted her voice to make it hers.

A German-made blockbuster, reimagined

The song itself was born in Frankfurt. Jennifer Rush, an American singer based in West Germany, wrote it in 1984 with her producers Candy DeRouge and Gunther Mende, along with lyricist Mary Susan Applegate. Rush’s original became a phenomenon — a UK No. 1, the best-selling British single of 1985, and, according to Guinness, the best-selling single ever by a female solo artist in the UK until Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” unseated it in 1992. But in the United States, Rush’s version stalled, and the song became famous stateside instead through a chain of covers: Air Supply first, then Branigan, and eventually Celine Dion, whose 1993 recording finally took it to No. 1 in America.

Branigan’s take arrived in October 1987 as the second single from her fifth album, Touch, produced by David Kershenbaum for Atlantic. By then Branigan was one of the defining voices of the decade — the powerhouse behind Gloria and Self Control, a singer who specialized in taking European songs and giving them full-throated American drama. “The Power of Love” was squarely in that tradition; she had built her whole career on transforming continental hits for the US market, and this was another one. Her version reached No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 that December and No. 19 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

The last time up the Top 40

What gives the record its quiet weight in hindsight is its place in her story. “The Power of Love” was Laura Branigan’s seventh Top 40 hit — and her last. After a run of five hugely successful years, the hits began to thin out, and this soaring ballad marked the final time she cracked the American Top 40. She kept recording into the 1990s, but the mainstream chart success that “Gloria” had kicked off in 1982 effectively closed with this song. Branigan died in 2004 at just 52, and in the years since, a devoted following has kept her catalog alive, rediscovering the sheer force of a voice that could take someone else’s song and make it sound like it had been waiting for her all along.

That, finally, is the thread connecting all these versions. “The Power of Love” — the Jennifer Rush one — is a song that almost nobody sang first and almost everybody sang eventually, each singer hearing something in it worth claiming. Branigan’s reading sits between Rush’s European original and Dion’s American juggernaut, a big-voiced 1987 snapshot of a song still searching for the definitive performance. Just don’t confuse it with the Huey Lewis hit. They only share a name.