Sheena Easton – Almost Over You

Sheena Easton wanted David Foster to produce her next record. His schedule said no, so he ended up playing piano on its one great ballad.

Partway through the video for Almost Over You, Sheena Easton tips a Defender arcade cabinet over the rail of an apartment balcony. It was 1983, the year the American video game business collapsed, and the machine goes over the edge while a Sinistar cabinet waits its turn nearby. Easton spends the rest of the clip singing and playing piano. The prop carries the song’s whole idea: a woman who is nearly finished with a relationship, still living among the things that belonged to it.

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The piano on the record belonged to someone Easton had wanted in a much bigger role. David Foster had produced We’ve Got Tonight, her 1983 duet with Kenny Rogers, and she hoped he would produce solo tracks for her next album. His schedule did not allow it. Foster played acoustic piano on exactly one song on Best Kept Secret, and this is the one.

The album was a deliberate break. Easton had made her first three albums in London with Christopher Neil, but the two disagreed about the material and the direction, and she took the sessions to Los Angeles instead, making her first album recorded entirely in the United States. Greg Mathieson, who with Trevor Veitch and Jay Graydon had just been behind Laura Branigan’s Gloria, shaped most of the record as dance-pop. The lead single, Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair), reached No.9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Easton a Grammy nomination.

Jennifer Kimball and Cindy Richardson wrote Almost Over You, and the same pair wrote Devil in a Fast Car for the album, a measure of how far apart the two halves of the record sat. Mathieson produced and arranged the ballad with a small band: Foster on piano, Leland Sklar on bass, Mike Baird on drums, and Lenny Castro on percussion. David Leonard engineered it, with Tchad Blake as second engineer.

Eighty-ninth in Britain, first in Canada

EMI released it as the album’s second single on October 10, 1983. Billboard ranked it as high as No.25 on the Hot 100 and No.4 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and it even crossed onto Hot Country Songs at No.86. Canada’s RPM placed it at No.1 on its Adult Contemporary chart in February 1984. At home, the UK chart took it only to No.89, and Best Kept Secret stopped at No.99. The singer who had broken through on BBC television three years earlier had become an American act.

The song traveled further than its chart peak suggests. Easton recorded it in Spanish as Todo Me Recuerda a Ti, and it gave its name to her first Spanish-language album, released on November 23, 1984, and produced by Mathieson with Juan Carlos Calderón. That album also carried Me Gustas Tal Como Eres, her duet with Luis Miguel, which won her a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance, and it went gold in Mexico and Argentina. Argentine singer Sandra Mihanovich covered the song in 1986. Country singer Lila McCann recorded it for her 1997 debut album, and released as a single in 1998, her version reached No.42 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.

A single that stalled at No.89 in its singer’s home country does not usually end up titling a Spanish-language album or charting in Nashville fifteen years later. Almost Over You did because nothing about it depended on the moment it was made. It was the one ballad on a record of dance tracks, played by the producer Easton could not get, and it held up every time another singer stripped the rest away.