Better Be Good to Me - 2015 Remaster

This song was written by Holly Knight and Mike Chapman. In a Songfacts interview with Holly Knight, she told the story: "I was seeing a guy at the time who kind of had this adorable little crush on me, this German guy. He came to my house and left me some flowers and a note, and it said something like, 'If you're good to me.' And I'm thinking, you know, if I can twist that around I can make it into a song."

Chapman and Knight wrote this for Knight's band Spider, who released the original version in 1981. Chapman and Knight wrote several hits together, including "Love Is A Battlefield" and "The Best, but this was the first song they ever wrote together. Chapman was an established songwriter, but this was new to Knight, who quickly learned she had a talent for composing songs. Says Knight: "I didn't know I was a songwriter 'til Mike Chapman told me I was. I was playing keyboard since I was 4, but I only wrote because everybody else in my band Spider was doing it, and they kind of sucked."

Tina Turner hewed close to the original Spider version of this song. Holly Knight told Songfacts: "You can see how much she respects the way the song sounded, because she's not a writer. Although in my opinion the only song she wrote was one of her best ('Nutbush City Limits'). She's very good at hearing something and appreciating how it was done, and leaving it that way. So you can really hear the original singer doing it, who's a white girl, that had a very soulful voice. And you know, our record didn't do anything. The production is similar, but ours is more like Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side," hers is a little bit more upbeat and stuff. But nonetheless, it's very similar."