There is a particular kind of heartbreak song that does not beg. It does not ask the lover to stay, does not promise to wait by the phone, does not collapse in the doorway as the taxi pulls away. It stands in the doorway, arms folded, and tells the departing lover to keep his tears for later, because he is going to need them. “Save Up All Your Tears” is that kind of song: a farewell delivered with a raised chin, a chorus that turns goodbye into a warning, and a vocal that sounds like it has already survived the worst of it. Millions of people know it as a Cher song. Fewer know that Cher was the third singer to record it. The first was Bonnie Tyler, and her version, released in 1988, is the one that started the whole story, even though almost nobody heard it at the time.
To understand why a song this good could pass almost unnoticed, you have to understand where Bonnie Tyler stood in 1988. Five years earlier she had been on top of the world. “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the Jim Steinman epic from her 1983 album Faster Than the Speed of Night, had reached number one in Britain and America, making her the first Welsh artist to top the American chart, and “Holding Out for a Hero,” from the Footloose soundtrack in 1984, had kept her there. But the second half of the decade had been less kind. Her 1986 album Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire, another Steinman collaboration, had not repeated the triumph, and Steinman himself was famously slow to work. Frustrated by the pace, Tyler made a change. She asked Desmond Child to produce her next album. Child was one of the hottest songwriters in pop: he had co-written Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and he had already contributed two songs to Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire. Tyler wanted his energy, his radio instincts, and his address book. What she got was an album full of songs that would become famous in other people’s voices.
The album was Hide Your Heart, released on 9 May 1988 through CBS Records, and called Notes from America in the United States, Canada and Brazil. It was Tyler’s seventh studio album, and it would be her final release for Columbia. The story of how it was made has become a small legend in its own right. CBS gave Child a budget to write and produce three songs. He stretched it to record a ten-track album. Within a few days at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, with additional recording at the Hit Factory and Right Track in New York City, the whole record was cut. “I begged the musicians to stay overtime,” Child recalled in a 2013 interview. The band on “Save Up All Your Tears” was a crack New York session crew: John McCurry on guitar, John Regan on bass, Jerry Marotta on drums and percussion, and Chuck Kentis on keyboards and synthesizer. Tyler herself had asked for Child, and the album also featured collaborations with Michael Bolton, Albert Hammond and Diane Warren. It was, on paper, a dream team. It was also, as it turned out, a songwriter’s showcase disguised as a Bonnie Tyler album.
The song at the centre of this story was written by Child with Diane Warren, the most prolific hitmaker of her generation, and produced by Child himself. It is built the way the great Warren songs are built: a plainspoken lyric, a melody that climbs, and a chorus that lands like a verdict. The singer addresses a lover who is leaving and tells him, in effect, not to waste his sorrow now, because the day will come when he realises what he has thrown away. “Baby, save up all your tears, you might need them someday,” runs the title line, and Tyler sings it the way only she could: that famous rasp, rougher and huskier since the throat surgery of the late 1970s, turning a clever lyric into something that sounds lived in. The album version runs 4:24, and a London Mix, mixed by Child, ran 4:20. Released as a single on 15 August 1988, with “It’s Not Enough” on the B-side, it should have been a natural hit. It was not.
The single, by the plain account of its chart history, barely registered. It did not approach the success of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” or “Holding Out for a Hero,” and it charted only on airplay charts in Europe. In America it failed to reach any Billboard chart at all, and in Britain it was only a minor hit. There was a video, and it did receive some airplay on MTV, but the record never caught fire. Why? Part of the answer is timing. By 1988, Tyler’s chart momentum had cooled considerably since 1983 and 1984, and her chart success, as she herself later acknowledged, was fading in the late 1980s. Part of the answer is that Hide Your Heart was an album out of step with its moment: a polished, songwriter-driven rock record arriving just as pop was moving toward dance production and hip-hop rhythms. And part of the answer is simply the cruel arithmetic of the music business. A great song is not always enough. It needs the right singer at the right moment with the right push behind it, and in 1988, for Bonnie Tyler, those stars did not align. She later admitted she struggled to understand the poor response to the album’s lead single, “The Best,” which would soon become an international hit for Tina Turner. The same bafflement could have applied to “Save Up All Your Tears.” The songs were not the problem. Everyone who heard them seemed to agree on that. The problem was that the world heard them from someone else first, or at least louder.
The first singer to prove the song’s worth was Robin Beck. In 1989, the American singer included her version on her second album, Trouble Or Nothin’, again produced by Child, with KISS frontman Paul Stanley on background vocals and Toto’s Steve Lukather on guitar. Beck’s version was the follow-up to her European number one “First Time,” and while it was not that kind of smash, it was a genuine hit across Europe: number ten in West Germany, number five in Switzerland, number seventeen in Sweden and number twenty-seven in Austria. Beck herself remembered hearing it climb the German chart while riding in a convertible in Munich, laughing and shouting, “It’s me, it’s me!” Her version got some MTV and radio airplay in America and was a minor hit in Britain, but it never reached the American Billboard charts. Still, Beck had shown what the song could do in the right hands at the right time. It had taken the song barely a year to travel from a neglected album track to a European top ten hit. It had two more lives to go.
The most famous of those lives began in 1991, when Cher recorded “Save Up All Your Tears” for her twentieth album, Love Hurts. Cher was in the middle of one of the great second acts in pop history, her late-1980s comeback in full swing, and she cut the song with a faster, harder arrangement, produced by Bob Rock and Richie Zito. Released on 7 October 1991 as the second American and third European single from the album, it became the version most of the world knows. It reached number thirty-seven on both the American Billboard Hot 100, where it spent twenty weeks, and the British chart, and it climbed to number sixteen on the American Adult Contemporary chart and number four on the British airplay chart. Billboard’s Larry Flick called it a “rousing, guitar-driven pop/rocker” with an “unshakable hook,” writing that Cher’s “aggressive vocal” was “a perfect top 40 radio marriage” and that it sounded “like a well-deserved smash.” Cher performed it on television, including on Dame Edna’s show and David Letterman’s Late Night, and its video, in which she wore three different wigs and three increasingly daring outfits, became part of the Love Hurts era’s imagery; a photograph from the shoot by Herb Ritts was even used for the tour poster. There is a neat footnote to the Cher connection: Tyler had sung backing vocals on Cher’s 1987 comeback album, on the track “Perfection,” though she never actually met Cher at the time. Cher later sent her an enormous arrangement of flowers. The two singers were linked by this song long before most listeners realised it.
And yet the song’s history does not belong to Cher alone, or even mainly to her. It belongs to a chain of voices, and Bonnie Tyler is the first link. She sang it first, in 1988, on an album whose every single seemed destined to become someone else’s hit: “The Best” became Tina Turner’s signature song, so completely that Tyler herself conceded, with characteristic grace, “I have to be honest, she did it much better than I did”; “Hide Your Heart” was recorded by KISS in 1989; “Don’t Turn Around” became a smash for Ace of Base. Looking back, Tyler has said that Turner’s success with “The Best” helped restore her confidence in her own musical choices at a moment when her chart career was fading. The same could be said of the whole album. Hide Your Heart is remembered less as a Bonnie Tyler record than as a treasure chest that other stars raided, and “Save Up All Your Tears” is its most travelled jewel: Tyler in 1988, Beck in 1989, Cher in 1991, and later versions by Freda Payne and the German band Bonfire besides. The song kept finding singers because the song itself never failed. Only its first release did.
That is what makes Tyler’s original worth returning to. Heard on its own terms, without the Cher version ringing in your ears, it is a different record: less glossy, more weathered, the vocal carrying the weight of a woman who has actually lived through the farewell she is singing about. Tyler’s voice was never pretty in the conventional sense, and that was always the point. Where Cher’s version is a strut, Tyler’s is a stare. Where Beck’s is a pop single, Tyler’s is a short story. The production, all gleaming late-eighties rock, frames that voice rather than overwhelming it, and the chorus, when it arrives, feels earned rather than manufactured. It is the sound of a singer who knew exactly what the song was about, even if the charts did not yet know what she was.
There is a final irony worth savouring. The song tells a departing lover to save his tears, because he will need them when he understands what he has lost. Pop history has played that line back on Bonnie Tyler herself, in reverse. The industry that let her version slip away spent the next three years proving, through Beck and then through Cher, that the song was a hit all along. The tears, it turned out, were worth saving. The song survived its first release, survived its second, and survived its third, and it is still sung, still covered, still recognised the moment its chorus arrives. Tyler sang it first. That fact alone would be enough to give her version its place in history. That the version itself is this good is the reason to actually go back and listen.
So listen to it again, or for the first time, as Bonnie Tyler sang it: not as a footnote to a Cher hit, but as the original statement of one of the great farewell songs of the late eighties, cut in a few breathless days in Woodstock by a singer and a producer who believed in it completely. It did not top the charts. It did something stranger and, in the end, more durable. It outlived its own failure, travelled through three voices and three countries, and came back as a classic. The lover in the song was told to save his tears. The song itself saved them for everyone.
Watch the video below and hear the version that started it all.
Sources:
Wikipedia — “Save Up All Your Tears” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Up_All_Your_Tears)
Wikipedia — “Hide Your Heart (album)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_Your_Heart_(album))
Retro Pop Magazine — “Bonnie Tyler: ‘Tina Turner helped me regain my confidence after ’80s success ended'” (https://retropopmagazine.com/bonnie-tyler-tina-turner-confidence-simply-the-best-cher-1980s/)
The Second Disc — “Holding On Forever: Bonnie Tyler Rarities Collected on 2-CD Set from Cherry Red” (https://theseconddisc.com/2017/12/12/holding-on-forever-bonnie-tyler-rarities-collected-on-2-cd-set-from-cherry-red/)
Femme Metal Webzine — Robin Beck interview (https://www.femmemetalwebzine.net/interviews/robin-beck/)
Bonnie Tyler Official Site — Biography (https://bonnietyler.com/bio/)