Sister Sledge – We Are Family

Official music video for Sister Sledge’s timeless smash hit “We Are Family” from the album “We Are Family”

“We Are Family” – Single by Sister Sledge from the album We Are Family
B-side: “Easier to Love”
Released: April 1979
Studio: Power Station, New York City, New York, US
Label: Cotillion
Songwriters: Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers
Producers: Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards
Charted No.2 in US, No.8 in UK, No.26 in West Germany, No.19 in Italy, No.1 in Canada

This feel-good disco song is fitting for Sister Sledge, a vocal group of four Sledge sisters: Kathy, Debbie, Kim and Joni (who died in 2017). The song could certainly apply to their family bonds, particularly the line, “I got all my sisters with me,” but it’s a more universal message.

A music video was filmed in 1979 to promote the single, featuring the group wearing red outfits and dancing to the song in a street-like setting.

Kathy Sledge, who sang lead, didn’t know the lyrics when she recorded her vocal. When she went into the vocal booth, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards fed her each line through her headphones as it came up to give her vocal a spontaneous feel.

“We Are Family” was the first song that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards wrote for any act other than their own band Chic. After their first hit, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)”, Atlantic Records President Jerry L. Greenberg encouraged the pair to write and produce for other acts on the label. However, Rodgers and Edwards did not feel confident enough to work with big, established recording artists and performers.They also felt that if they worked as Greenberg had suggested, the label would not give them proper credit for their work. To build up their reputation, the pair asked Greenberg to let them work with the least established act he had signed; if they got a hit record, then they could take on the challenge of writing for someone bigger.

According to Rodgers, the verses were mostly verbatim based on how Greenberg described Sister Sledge to him and Edwards when first commissioning the work. Rodgers/Edwards then simply walked immediately to the studio, rearranged their notes from the meeting into lyrics, and wrote a song melody underneath them. The chorus (and therefore the title) makes reference to the fact that the group are the four sisters of a family, and sought to reintroduce the group to mainstream audiences after their two unsuccessful prior albums.