1987 • Behind the Songs
Bacharach and Sager wrote it, Kenny G played on it, and two voices made it fly.
In June 1987, Dionne Warwick released a single that would turn out to be a quiet milestone: “Love Power,” her duet with Jeffrey Osborne, the lead single from her album Reservations for Two. It reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and though nobody knew it at the time, it would be her final Top 40 hit. That gives the record a particular poignancy in retrospect. But in the summer of 1987, it was simply a gorgeous, expertly made duet: two great voices, a legendary songwriting team, and a saxophone solo by the biggest instrumental star of the decade. Nobody was coasting; everybody was working.
The songwriting team was the story. “Love Power” was written and produced by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager — and the Bacharach name carried weight for Warwick. Two decades earlier, Bacharach (with Hal David) had written the songs that made her a star. Now here he was again, in a new decade and a new partnership, writing for the same voice. Sager, one of the era’s most successful lyricists, brought the contemporary polish. Together, they built the song around the thing Warwick has always done best: make sophistication feel like feeling. It was the old magic, updated: the same harmonic sophistication, now dressed for 1987 radio.
The other voice belonged to Jeffrey Osborne. The former lead singer of the soul-funk band L.T.D. had been building a solo career through the mid-1980s, and “Love Power” became his biggest crossover moment: his only number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, and his last Top 40 hit on the Hot 100. (His follow-up, “She’s on the Left,” would top the R&B chart but stall at number 48 on the Hot 100 the next year.) Osborne’s warm, grainy tenor was the ideal foil for Warwick’s cool precision — the duet works because the two voices never try to be each other.
The session reads like a roll call of 1980s studio royalty. Greg Phillinganes played keyboards; David Foster — already the decade’s defining hitmaker behind the glass — played synthesizers, with Bacharach himself adding more. Dann Huff played guitars, Nathan East played bass, Carlos Vega played drums, and Tim Feehan and Joe Pizzulo sang backing vocals. The alto saxophone solo came from Kenny G, then at the peak of his commercial powers. Clive Davis served as executive producer; Mick Guzauski engineered and mixed; Bernie Grundman mastered. It was, in every sense, the A-team — and you can hear the budget in every bar.
Arista released “Love Power” in June 1987 as the lead single from Reservations for Two, and the label gave it the full treatment. The 7-inch B-side was “In a World Such as This”; the 12-inch added “No One in the World,” a Ken Hirsch–Martha Sharron song produced by Barry Manilow — a neat thread connecting Warwick’s comeback eras. The single ran 4:32: long enough for Osborne and Warwick to trade verses, for Kenny G to sing his verse on the horn, and for Bacharach and Sager’s chorus to do its work.
The album it led, Reservations for Two, was Warwick’s bid to consolidate the Arista comeback on adult radio’s terms — sleek, romantic, and unapologetically polished. “Love Power” set the template: star songwriters, star players, and Warwick at the center, doing what she had always done. It was not a reinvention. It was a reaffirmation, delivered at a moment when the charts were about to change around her.
The charts told a story of an artist in transition. “Love Power” went to number one on the US Adult Contemporary chart — Warwick’s sixth chart-topper there, confirming where her most loyal audience lived. It reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 5 on the Hot R&B chart, and number 11 on Cash Box; in Canada it hit number 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and in the UK it reached number 63. The Hot 100 peak is the one history remembers: number 12, her final visit to the Top 40, the end of a chart run that had begun a quarter-century earlier.
Then came the strangest footnote. In 1994, heavy metal singers Glenn Danzig and Lita Ford performed a cover of “Love Power” during the Grammy Awards ceremony — a sentence that sounds invented but is not. It remains one of the most gloriously unlikely cover versions in pop history: the prince of darkness and the queen of metal, earnestly crooning a Bacharach-Sager ballad. If a song can survive that, it can survive anything. Warwick, to her credit, has always seemed delighted by the song’s strange afterlives rather than embarrassed by them.
What to listen for is the architecture of the duet. Warwick and Osborne do not blend so much as converse — her crystalline phrasing against his warmer grain, trading lines like two people finishing each other’s sentences. Kenny G’s alto sax solo arrives like a third voice, all smooth curves, and underneath it all you can hear Bacharach’s harmonic fingerprints: the chord changes that lift where you least expect them. It is adult pop at its most expertly constructed — and its most sincere.
There is a temptation to hear “Love Power” as an ending — the last Top 40 hit, the close of a chart story. But it plays better as a demonstration: proof that Warwick, twenty-five years into her career, could still walk into a studio with the best writers, the best players, and a new partner, and walk out with something undeniable. The power in the title was never just romance. It was the power of a professional at the height of hers — and on this record, there are two of them. That is love power, properly understood — the power of craft, the power of partnership, and the power of love itself.