1982 · Behind the Songs
Burt Bacharach had been listening to her since the late 1960s. When Hollywood made its first mainstream film about a gay man, he wrote the theme — and Roberta Flack made it a quiet landmark.
In February 1982, a film opened that Hollywood had never quite dared to make before. Making Love, released by 20th Century Fox, was the first mainstream American movie to treat a gay man — a married doctor who falls in love with another man — with seriousness and sympathy rather than caricature or tragedy. It was a risk, and the studio knew it. The film needed a theme song that could say what the marketing couldn’t: that this was a story about love, full stop. They turned to Burt Bacharach, and Bacharach turned to a singer he had admired for more than a decade.
Bacharach, together with Bruce Roberts and Carole Bayer Sager, wrote “Making Love” as the film’s title song. For the recording, there was only one voice he wanted: Roberta Flack’s. The connection went back a long way. In the late 1960s, before Flack was famous, Bacharach used to slip into Mr. Henry’s, the Capitol Hill club where she held a residency, just to hear her sing. He never forgot it. When the time came to record the theme, Flack became the first singer to put a Bacharach composition on record in this chapter of his career — and she did it on her own terms.
Flack didn’t just sing the song; she arranged it. The session has become a small legend among musicians: she sight-read the material in the studio, shaping the track around her piano and voice with the confidence of someone who had spent years leading a band from the keyboard. Bacharach and Bayer Sager are credited as producers, but the record’s intimacy — its unhurried, after-hours feel — is pure Flack. At three minutes and forty-three seconds, it doesn’t waste a note.
The single was released on February 16, 1982, with “Jesse” on the B-side, and it found its audience quickly. It climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 7 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and number 29 on the R&B chart, and it finished the year at number 46 on the Hot 100 year-end ranking. For Flack, it was a reminder that she could still command pop radio a full decade after “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — and that she could do it with a song tied to a film most radio programmers would have considered a gamble.
The lyric walks a careful, deliberate line. “There’s more to love than making love,” Flack sings — a sentence that appeared on the film’s posters and became the production’s quiet thesis. In the context of a movie about a man discovering his sexuality, the line reads as both reassurance and expansion: love is bigger than any single definition. Flack herself put it plainly when she spoke about the song, saying that love is universal. She didn’t frame the record as a statement or a cause; she framed it as a human song, and she sang it that way.
The album context matters too. “Making Love” appeared on Flack’s 1982 album I’m the One, her first solo record of newly recorded songs in several years. The album didn’t produce another hit on the same scale, which has made the title song stand out even more in retrospect — a bright, self-contained moment on a record that was otherwise finding its footing. That it came from a film, rather than from the usual album machinery, only adds to its distinctiveness.
The song has had a quiet afterlife. The Chi-Lites cut a version, as did the Dutch singer Anita Meyer and the Filipino-American artist Jaya — each drawn to the melody’s sturdiness and the lyric’s open heart. None matched Flack’s chart success, but that was never really the point. The song was written for a specific film at a specific moment, and Flack’s recording captured that moment completely.
What to listen for: the way Flack enters — no buildup, no fanfare, just that unmistakable voice, warm and certain. The piano, which she arranged herself, stays out of the way of the vocal while giving it everything it needs. The bridge, where her classical training shows in the control of her dynamics. And the final chorus, where she leans into the title phrase not as a provocation but as a benediction.
Looking back, “Making Love” feels like a hinge in Flack’s career — a Top 20 pop hit that arrived without fanfare, tied to a film that was itself a quiet act of courage. Bacharach heard her in a small club in the 1960s and remembered. Hollywood took a chance in 1982 and she delivered. And the song, like the film, endures as proof that the biggest statements are sometimes made in the softest voice.