You Should Hear How She Talks About You

Melissa Manchester was a top female vocalist of the late '70s and early '80s. She was mostly known for ballads like "Midnight Blue" (#6, 1975) and "Don't Cry Out Loud" (#10, 1979), but had her biggest hit with this uptempo song, which was the last of her seven Top 10 hits in the US, and also her biggest. Manchester didn't like the song at first, but eventually made friends with it. "It was presented to me at an interesting moment," she said in a Songfacts interview. "Disco music was all the rage and the powers that be at Arista Records were trying to talk me into putting my toe in the water, because I was really known as a balladeer at that point." Manchester was a little miffed when the song became a hit and she was expected to perform it. She even tried re-arranging it and removing it from her setlist. Then she had a change of heart. "I was so full of myself in that moment," she said. "I thought, How am I going to grow old singing this tempo in this rhythm in this style of song? I put it away for a minute and then I tried to rearrange it for stage performances. Then I took a breath and I thought, What are you doing? This is a gift. Just say thank you and move along. So, of course, I re-instilled it at my concerts and the audience gets hysterical. It's great fun and I'm forever grateful."

Melissa Manchester co-wrote many of her songs, but this one came from outside writers: Dean Pitchford and Tom Snow. They consider the song a modern take on "She Loves You" by The Beatles - the idea of hearing about someone's affections from another person. Snow and Pitchford were always swapping song ideas, and this song gelled when Snow came up with the vamp. Pitchford told Songfacts: "If you listen to the bass line and the motif of that song. He played it for me and when he got to the chorus and the (singing) 'dun dun da da da da da da' I had this idea: this might be the song where we write our modern day 'She Loves You.' I said, this could be the 'You should hear.' But the first thing that I gave him was 'You should hear the way she talks about you,' and it was a little awkward, it tripped over itself. He took it and he jagged it up, with the (staccato), 'You. Should. Hear. How. She. Talks. About. You.' With all those catch-rhythms. That was another case where we planted that title on the first line. Then I took away the rest of the melody and wrote the rest from there." Pitchford and Snow teamed up again to write the #1 hit "Let's Hear It For The Boy" for Pitchford's movie Footloose.

This was first recorded in 1981 by Charlie Dore, a British female singer who had a US #10 hit in 1980 with "Pilot Of The Airwaves." Her version didn't catch on, but when Manchester recorded it a year later, it became a big hit and won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.