Doing It All For My Baby

This slice of retro-soul was written by Michael Duke and Philip Cody. Duke played in The Outlaws and wrote a song called "Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do," which Huey Lewis & the News recorded in 1982. Cody wrote the lyrics for most of Neil Sedaka's '70s hits, and also wrote the words to the Carpenters hit "Solitaire." Speaking of writing with Duke and coming up with this song, Cody told Songfacts, "We were sort of musical soul brothers - we were looking for the same kind of musical epiphanies. So we would talk and then we got together and we wrote 'Doing It All For My Baby,' which was just an afternoon's work. I was newly into living with a woman who turned out to be my wife Barbara, and feeling good about life, and that was just the recounting of a day in my life where everything that happens revolves around her."

Cody and Duke were working for Lawrence Welk's publishing company when they wrote this song (yes, the same Lawrence Welk known for playing the accordion and bringing wholesome entertainment to America on The Lawrence Welk Show). Michael Duke recorded a demo, but Welk's company couldn't find a taker for the song. Said Cody, "They didn't know what to do with it, they had no idea. Mike went on tour with Delbert McClinton and at some point was doing club gigs in Mississippi. Some guys from Huey's band came in to see the gig and he was playing 'Doing It All For My Baby.' The guys in the band said, 'Wow, we love this song. We're going to bring it to Huey.' And they brought it in, and three years after we wrote the song, Huey Lewis & the News recorded the song and put it on their biggest selling album ever."

The band produced an extended video for the song that lasted almost 8 minutes and resulted an one of the iconic MTV images of the '80s: the band's heads on display in glass cases while they sing this song. In the clip, the band gets stranded somewhere spooky, and end up in various Frankenstein scenes with Lewis playing Dr. Frankenstein.