I Was Made For Lovin' You

In 1977, The Rolling Stones had a successful quasi-disco song with "Miss You," and two years later, it was Kiss' turn to cash in. According to the book KISS: Behind the Mask, Paul Stanley wrote this song along with hit songwriter Desmond Child and producer Vini Poncia in an effort to prove how easy it was to write a disco song. It was a big hit, selling over a million copies and becoming a concert favorite.

This is the song that made it acceptable for rock bands to get help from professional songwriters, and it was also Desmond Child's first hit as a writer. He became one of the most successful songwriters of all time; his hits include "Livin' La Vida Loca," "Inside Your Heaven," and "I Hate Myself For Loving You." In our 2012 interview with Desmond Child, he explained, "In 1979, I co-wrote 'I Was Made for Loving You' with Paul Stanley of Kiss. This is a band that didn't do that much outside writing. But Paul and Gene wrote songs together, then on their own they wrote songs, and then they put those songs together, and that would be Kiss. So Paul asked me to co-write a song with him, and that song turned out to be a ginormous hit, and to this day still earns a lot of income performance wise and also within the compilations of Kiss' greatest hits. And it's used often and in commercials and movies and things like that. So that opened the door to a career in songwriting that had not existed before. Bands usually co-wrote amongst themselves, and it was usually the lead singer and the lead guitar player. And then perhaps they'd allow a producer to jump in and work with them on a song that may get that producer a songwriting credit. But bringing in an outside professional songwriter was not something that bands thought was credible or the cool thing to do, because they were afraid of the perception that they couldn't write their own songs. Somehow the producer jumping in was permissible, but not an outside songwriter. So when I did that with KISS, it opened the door for other bands to try it. The next band that I worked with was Bon Jovi, and the very first day we got together we wrote 'You Give Love A Bad Name.' Then a few weeks later we wrote 'Livin' On A Prayer.'"

In a Songfacts interview with Paul Stanley, he said the melody line for "I Was Made for Lovin' You" was lifted from "Standing In The Shadows Of Love" by The Four Tops, which you can hear if you compare the hooks: "I was made for lovin' you baby" "Standing in the shadows of love"