White Heat (Dusty Springfield album)
| White Heat | ||||
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| Studio album by Dusty Springfield | ||||
| Released | December 1982 | |||
| Recorded |
Conway Recording Studios, Kendun Recorders, Group IV Studios, Hollywood, California, November 1981– June 1982 |
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| Genre | Pop, new wave | |||
| Length | 37:44 | |||
| Label |
Casablanca Records NBLP 7271 (US) |
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| Producer | Howard Steele Dusty Springfield |
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| Dusty Springfield chronology | ||||
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
White Heat is the twelfth studio album recorded by singer Dusty Springfield, and eleventh released. It was only released in the United States and Canada.
More so than her previous two albums, It Begins Again (1978), and Living Without Your Love (1979), and the non-album single "It Goes Like It Goes" (1980), White Heat was a distinct departure from Springfield's Los Angeles-produced radio-friendly soft rock sound, being closely identified with the new wave, synthpop sounds of the early 1980s. The album arguably contains the most diverse selection of genres to be collected on any Dusty Springfield studio album, ranging from Robbie Buchanan's ballad "Time and Time Again", orchestrated by James Newton Howard, to the aggressive hard rock of "Blind Sheep", co-written by Springfield herself. The sessions for "Blind Sheep" are the last designated sessions for Twentieth Century Fox Records in the Musician's Guild Logs.
The album's opening track and only single release was "Donnez-Moi (Give It to Me)" which production wise took more than a few hints from contemporaneous synthesizer-driven pop productions by Giorgio Moroder, like Donna Summer's The Wanderer and Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What a Feeling", and British New Romantic bands like the Human League and their 1981 album Dare.
Jean-Alain Roussel lived in Montreal at the time. Springfield lived part-time in Toronto at this stage in her life; the two met through mutual friends and ended up collaborating on most of White Heat.
Written by Canadian New Wave band Rough Trade's Carole Pope and Kevan Staples, "Soft Core" describes the realities of a dysfunctional relationship. "Soft Core" was cut in a single take by sheer mistake, thanks to an engineer throwing a tape machine into 'record', with composer Kevan Staples playing a grand piano. The sound of footsteps heard at the beginning of the track is, in fact, Springfield walking up to the piano for what she thought was just a rehearsal.
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