US Top 40 Singles for the Week Ending November 5, 1983

Kenny and Dolly are still holding strong at #1. Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” moves into the top 5. Joel had originally titled the song “Uptown Girls” and it was conceived on an occasion when he was surrounded by Christie Brinkley, Whitney Houston and his then girlfriend Elle Macpherson. According to numerous interviews with Joel, the song was initially written about his relationship with Macpherson, but it ended up also becoming about his soon to be wife, Brinkley (both women being two of the most famous supermodels of the 1980s).

US Top 40 Singles for the Week Ending October 1, 1983

• Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of The Heart” moves into the #1 spot. A song penned by Jim Steinman, it was originally SEVEN MINUTES long and titled “Vampires In Love”. He wrote it while working on the musical version of Nosferatu.
• Another Jim Steinman song, Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All”, moves into the top 5. It’s a song that was originally presented to Meat Loaf for his Midnight at the Lost and Found album. Meat Loaf claims both of these songs were presented to him for said album but Steinman refutes this claim saying he wront “Eclipse” specifically with Bonnie Tyler in mind.

US Top 40 Singles for the Week Ending September 17, 1983

• Prince moves back into the top 40 with “Delirious”. Fun fact: The instrumental parts of the song was used as the theme song to the Captain Kangaroo segment, “Hello America”, in the 1980s.
• “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads is climbing the charts. It has one of the funniest song stories I’ve read:

The initial lyrics were considerably different, however. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” aired on December 2, 1984, David Byrne played excerpts of early work tapes showing how the song had evolved from an instrumental jam. Once the whole band had reworked the groove into something resembling the final recording, Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he arrived at a phrasing that fit with the rhythms: “and then I [would] just write words to fit that phrasing…at one point in the process, instead of chanting ‘Burning Down the House,’ I was chanting ‘Foam Rubber, USA.'”