{"id":385953,"date":"2026-01-03T16:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T16:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/385953\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T16:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T16:53:08","slug":"which-hit-single-should-have-won-song-of-the-year-at-the-1985-grammy-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/385953\/","title":{"rendered":"Which Hit Single Should Have Won Song of the Year at the 1985 Grammy Awards?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You won\u2019t find a more hallowed honor for songwriters than Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards. In the Grammy Awards ceremony held in 1985, the five contenders all had enjoyed runs as smash hit singles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got To Do With It\u201d by Tina Turner ended up taking the big award that night. We\u2019re here to tell you if it deserved it, first by looking back at all five nominees. Then we\u2019ll render our judgment.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgainst All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)\u201d by Phil Collins<\/p>\n

When Phil Collins recorded his debut solo album, he worried that he had too many heartbroken ballads. Thus, he left a song called \u201cHow Can You Just Sit There?\u201d on the cutting-room floor. A few years later, the producers of a film called Against All Odds came calling, looking for a theme song. Collins tweaked the previous song and came out of the process with a showstopper of a slow one.<\/p>\n

\u201cTime After Time\u201d by Cyndi Lauper<\/p>\n

Cyndi Lauper delivered the brassy side of her artistic persona with her debut single, \u201cGirls Just Want To Have Fun\u201d. She then broadsided anyone who wanted to pigeonhole her by dropping a sensitive standout ballad. \u201cTime After Time\u201d also gave folks a glimpse at Lauper as a writer. She penned the song with Rob Hyman, who, at the time, was just about to go pretty big in his own right as a member of The Hooters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello\u201d by Lionel Richie<\/p>\n

Richie had proven by this time that he could do more than soft-spoken ballads, as he\u2019d scored several uptempo solo hits as well. But how could he resist occasionally going back to the slow stuff that first won him acclaim as a member of The Commodores? \u201cHello\u201d gives him the opportunity to do some serious emoting on the mic. And speaking of emoting, who can forget that over-the-top video?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got To Do With It\u201d by Tina Turner<\/p>\n

This is the only song on the list where the artist did not have a hand in writing the song. But you can argue that Turner\u2019s impact on the recording transformed a just-OK song on the page. In fact, Turner herself didn\u2019t think much of the song composed by Graham Lyle and Terry Britten, at least not until they played around with the arrangement and the song fell into her soulful wheelhouse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Just Called To Say I Love You\u201d by Stevie Wonder<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a scene in the film High Fidelity where the snobby record-store clerk, played by Jack Black, insults a customer for requesting this song. The implication being that Wonder had done much more substantial work in this career. That\u2019s certainly true enough. But there\u2019s nothing wrong with occasionally churning out a simple pop confection like this calendar-spanning song from the movie The Woman In Red.<\/p>\n

The Verdict<\/p>\n

Like we hinted above, \u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got To Do With It\u201d gets a huge boost from Turner\u2019s performance. But this award is based on the songwriting, which, for that track, pales compared to some of the others. Wonder\u2019s song is too slight to really get a look.<\/p>\n

That leaves three heart-rending ballads to compete. And while Richie and Collins bring all their formidable powers to bear on their songs, \u201cTime After Time\u201d, subtler and more affecting than the rest, outpaces them and should have been the winner of this particular 1985 Grammy Award.<\/p>\n

Photo by Ross Marino\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You won\u2019t find a more hallowed honor for songwriters than Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,50706,341,5474,5475],"class_list":{"0":"post-385953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-grammy-awards","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-pop-music","14":"tag-rock-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}