Bette Davis Eyes — (Approximately) Five Paragraphs on a Five Star Song
(one man’s attempt to better understand the music that moves him…)
artist: Kim Carnes
track: Bette Davis Eyes
album: Mistaken Identity
year: 1981
runtime: 3:41
Artist:
All Hail Kim Carnes.
The LA-born, Nashville-residing Carnes was a songwriter and background singer before breaking out on her own. More successful as a writer than as a performer, she nonetheless won Record of the Year and Song of the Year for Bette Davis Eyes. With only a few of her other songs making the top forty, she’s not technically a one-hit wonder, but few folks outside of the industry could name one of her other tunes.
However, for the purpose of this brief essay, I posit that Ms. Carnes is BATMAN. Because Bette Davis Eyes is simply perfect.
Flow, Mood and Feel:
Lush. Direct. Awesome. Unflinching. Carnes took the head-on intensity of new wave and applied that to her lyrical delivery, and took the glissando ultra-smooth production values of mainstream pop in that same era and applied them to the instruments. In doing so, she created an instant classic.
The synth lead is memorable and spectacular, and the way it slightly evolves as each verse proceeds has a lovely, natural flow. The instruments’ pitch-perfection and complete beat synch serve as a great counterpoint to Ms. Carnes’ raspy, Rod-Stewart-like delivery.
There aren’t many other songs that can compare to this one; the closest in my mind is probably fellow rasper Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart — another over-the-top, operatic, alternate-universe masterpiece. (Or a bunch of stuff by Meat Loaf, I suppose.)
(And if you have ANY doubt about Carnes’ vision for this song, please listen to the original song, written by Jackie DeShannon and Donna Weiss, and performed by DeShannon. And then wrap your little brain about this conundrum: how did Ms. Carnes hear THAT white-girl lite-R&B silly bouncy song, and contemplate the possibility of altering it so completely and thoroughly that her reboot became an smooth-pop-synth-camp gem? How? Prepare to have your mind blown: the original, which you haven’t heard, is **here**. Really. Check it out.)
Grace Notes:
Carnes commits herself fully to the campiness of the song. She revels in her scratchy voice, not worrying that it sets her apart from the world of Perfect Pop Divas. She half-sings, half-speaks many words, even though she’s got a blowtorch for a voice and could hit any conceivable note she chose. She invests herself fully in the highbrow lyrics, not shying away from the song as originally written.
Despite the perfection I claim above, there are intentional wrong notes. (Well, dissonant notes, anyway — and given how perfect and smooth the song is overall, I doubt they’re accidental.) You first hear this half-tone-off note at 0:08, when the secondary, high-pitched synth part kicks in — listen carefully to the third note of the repeating sequence here and later in the song, and I believe you’ll agree that the song would call for a major scale escalation in that place, rather than this minor tone. Hats off to Carnes or whichever producer thought to include that (or leave it in) — once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
There’s another error — probably. The line “She knows just what it takes to make a pro blush” is a great line, but almost certainly is a misheard lyric from the original composition. My Pennsylvania Hill Country relatives (yeah, all of them are dead) would be happy to correct her — “She could make a crow blush” was, during a place in American history, the correct phrasing for a rather forward lady. (Or maybe it wasn’t misheard — perhaps in the year 1981, Carnes was intentionally providing an update to a sexist trope!)
And she hisses the final ess of “Bette Davis Eyessssssssssss” to an absurd extreme after most verses (first instance at 1:12), because she decided the damn song called for this arch foolishness, and damn the torpedoes, she was going to REPRESENT.
When to listen to this song:
When your hair is PERFECT and you KNOW IT.
And again: All Hail Kim Carnes.
