About The Song
“The band had been trying to get Linda to add it to her set for quite awhile,” recalls pianist Andrew Gold, “but we never got around to working up an arrange- ment. One night at a Long Island club called My Father’s Place we received six encores. We’d run out of tunes. One of us yelled out ‘”Heat Wave” in D’ and we did it. We were awfully sloppy but the crowd really liked it. So we kept the song in our set.”
“Heat Wave,” the first single to be drawn from Linda Ronstadt’s Prisoner in Disguise album, is one of her fastest-selling records to date. It and its flip side, “Love Is a Rose,” are getting equal airplay (“Love” is stronger on country music stations).
“Heat Wave” is a collaboration involving Ronstadt, bassist (and fellow former Stone Poney) Kenny Edwards, multi- instrumentalist Gold and producer Peter Asher.
Asher, whose experience as producer includes work with John Stewart, Barbara Keith and James Taylor, likes “things to be sort of fairly perfect” in the studio. This philosophy led to many, many hours of work on “Heat Wave,” in a process that would amuse the old-line Motown musicians involved in the almost assembly-line approach that resulted in hits including Martha and the Vandellas’ 1963 recording of the song.
“We tried cutting rhythm tracks several different times,” said Asher, “each with a slightly different group of musicians. None of them sounded right. So eventually we got down to Andrew playing drums and Kenny playing bass. Andrew is a remarkable musician, but even then just getting a bass and drum track took a few days to do.”
Gold then overdubbed two electric and two acoustic guitars, piano, percussion and an Arp string synthesizer. Asher joined in for the hand clapping, rerecorded four times to get the effect of eight people.
Eventually, Ronstadt came in to overdub her lead vocal, in what might outwardly seem her only contribution to the record. “Not so,” said Asher emphatically. “She’d come in from time to time to check our progress and indicate whether she was pleased.”
In contrast, “Love Is a Rose” was completed quickly.
The song was originally written by Neil Young in Hawaii for an album scheduled for 1975 release under the title Homegrown. The album, at Young’s insistence, was post- poned and he offered the song to Ronstadt at Asher’s request. Young’s version was, according to Gold, “much different. Slower without any of that funky barn dance quality on Linda’s record.”
The vocal, fiddle (David Lindley), bass (Edwards), drums (Russell Kunkel), banjo (Herb Pedersen) and acoustic guitar (Gold) were recorded live in what Gold remembers as being about an hour’s time. Subsequently, Gold added a second acoustic guitar. Jim Connor, an associate of John Denver’s, dropped by the studio and wound up adding the harmony part.
It’s an irony not lost on the participating musicians that the two sides were recorded in such dramatically contrasting fashion: one the deliberate and arduous creation of an intended hit single, the other a spontaneous, just-for-the-fun-of-it gambol. That irony makes no difference, though, in the two sides’ assault on the charts, proving once again that “it’s what’s in the grooves that counts.”
Video
Lyric
Whenever I’m with him
Something inside
Starts to burning
And I’m filled with desire
Could be the devil in me
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heat wave
Burning in my heart (heat wave, c’mon)
Can’t keep from crying (heat wave)
It’s tearing me apart (heat wave)
Whenever he calls my name (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh)
Soft, low, sweet and plain
I feel, yeah, yeah (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh)
Well, I feel that burning flame (burning, burning)
Has high blood pressure got a hold on me
Or is this the way love’s supposed to be?
It’s like a heat wave
Burning in my heart (heat wave)
Can’t keep from crying (heat wave)
It’s tearing me apart (heat wave)
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Sometimes I stare into space
Tears all over my face (face, face, face)
I can’t explain it (don’t understand it)
I hadn’t ever felt like this before
Now that funny feeling has me amazed
I Don’t know what to do
My head’s in a haze
It’s like a heat wave
Burning in my heart (heat wave)
Can’t keep from crying (heat wave)
It’s tearing me apart (heat wave)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (burning, burning)
Yeah, yeah oh, oh (heat wave)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (burning, burning, oh, oh)
(Heat wave)
Don’t pass up this chance
This time it’s true romance
Heat wave
Heat wave
Heat wave
Heat wave