Promises In The Dark

Benatar wrote this song with her guitarist and future husband, Neil Giraldo. The song deals with trials and tribulations of past relationships and how they affect the one you're in now. Haven't we all had to tend the emotional scars left behind from whoever got there first? In the case of Giraldo and Benatar, things worked out quite well: They got married in a cow pasture in Maui in 1982, and have been married ever since. They've also continued their musical partnership as well, with Giraldo producing all of Benatar's next albums.

Giraldo and Benatar were dating when they wrote this song, which was early in their musical partnership. In a Songfacts interview with Neil Giraldo, he explained: "That was a song that Patricia started first. I mean, I start probably 93% of them, and she'll jump in after I get it started. But she actually started writing that on an airplane. And then she put some words together, and she said, 'Here, try to do something with this thing.' Actually she slipped the words under the door of our music room in this little house we had. We wrote that I think in 1980. Even though we could have put it on Crimes of Passion, we ended up putting it on Precious Time instead. But she put the words under the door because she was too embarrassed to let me see the words face to face. Then she had a little bit of an idea of a melody, so I took a little bit of what that was, and I wrote it on piano in our little music room. My favorite guitar I had in the room at the time fell and busted while I was writing, and busted the top of the neck off it. So that was like a curse. And then when we went to record it, we had everything but the last verse, and then I just wrote the words for the last verse in the studio while we were recording it. So that's how that one goes."

Precious Time cracked the #1 spot on the US albums chart for a week and helped establish Benatar as an '80s icon. A former bank clerk and singing waitress, she was a classically trained singer who could rock the spandex and big jewelry, making her an MTV favorite as well as a mainstay on pop radio.