1978 · Behind the Songs
The second single from a debut that refused to sit still.
When Chaka Khan stepped out of Rufus to make her first solo album, she did not ease into it. Chaka, released in October 1978 on Warner Bros. and produced by Arif Mardin at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York, was described by AllMusic as “a near-total break from Rufus” — a record that treated her voice as a bandleader in its own right. “Life Is a Dance,” written by Gavin Christopher, sits at track five and runs four minutes and twenty seconds of pure momentum.
Released as the album’s second single in January 1979, following the blockbuster “I’m Every Woman,” the song climbed to No. 40 on the R&B chart — a modest showing next to its predecessor, but a telling one. Khan herself is credited as a musical arranger on the track, and the personnel reads like a roll call of late-1970s session royalty: Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker and David Sanborn on horns, Luther Vandross and Cissy Houston on backing vocals, Steve Ferrone and Rick Marotta on drums, Anthony Jackson and Will Lee on bass, Cornell Dupree and Phil Upchurch on guitars, and Richard Tee on clavinet and piano.
The album reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200 and was certified Gold by the RIAA in November 1978. A decade later, the song’s title got a second life when it was borrowed for the 1989 remix collection Life Is a Dance: The Remix Project — the set whose reworking of “I’m Every Woman” became a Top-Ten hit in Britain. Heard today, “Life Is a Dance” sounds like the thesis statement of that debut: a voice with room to move, and a groove that refuses to stand still.