Every long reign has a final coronation, and Anne Murray’s arrived in the spring of 1986. “Now and Forever (You and Me)” — a gleaming ballad built by David Foster, the Canadian producer then busy defining the sound of mainstream pop — became her tenth No. 1 on the US country chart. It was also her last. Nobody knew it at the time, least of all Murray, but the record stands as a closing door: the final chart-topper of a sixteen-year run, and, as it turned out, the last No. 1 by any non-American on the Billboard country chart for nearly a decade, until another Canadian, Shania Twain, arrived to break the drought.
David Foster Comes to Call
Murray did not arrive at 1986 in decline. Her previous album, Heart Over Mind, had delivered two more country No. 1s — the Dave Loggins duet “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” and, in 1985, “Time Don’t Run Out on Me,” her ninth chart-topper. But her formula — Jim Ed Norman productions, Nashville songs, three-format crossover — was meeting a changing radio landscape in which country was hardening and pop was going synthetic, and Capitol tried something bold for her twentieth studio album, Something to Talk About. They paired her with David Foster.
The choice was a statement. Foster, born in Victoria, British Columbia, was at that moment arguably the most powerful pop producer alive: he had co-written Earth, Wind & Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone,” engineered Chicago’s comeback with “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” and “You’re the Inspiration,” and was months away from another No. 1 with Peter Cetera’s “The Glory of Love.” He was also on his way to becoming the ballad king of the Whitney Houston and Celine Dion era. Billboard framed the experiment in a February 15, 1986 headline: “Anne Murray Going Pop Again After Six Years.” Foster didn’t just produce the album’s centerpiece single; he co-wrote it.
The title track tells its own ironic footnote: “Something to Talk About,” written by Shirley Eikhard, sat on the album unreleased as a Murray single — and five years later Bonnie Raitt took the same song into the pop Top 5 and won a Grammy with it. Murray’s album was full of futures; its biggest present, though, was the Foster ballad chosen as its first single.
One Afternoon’s Work
Jim Vallance, Bryan Adams’s longtime writing partner, has recounted how the song came together: “I was thrilled that David Foster asked me to co-write this song with him. In an afternoon he and I came up with a bed track and a melody, and a few rough lyrics. David finished the lyrics a few weeks later in Los Angeles with Randy Goodrum.”
The geography alone tells a story: a producer from Victoria and a songwriter from Vancouver building a song in a home studio, for a singer from Springhill, Nova Scotia — an all-Canadian production at the summit of the American charts. And the third name closes a beautiful circle. Randy Goodrum was the songwriter behind “You Needed Me” — the 1978 ballad that had given Murray her first US pop No. 1 and her Grammy-winning breakthrough. Now, eight years on, Goodrum helped finish the song that would give her her final country No. 1. The two records bookend her reign: the Nashville writer who started it, and the same writer, now working in David Foster’s Los Angeles, ending it.
The Foster sessions were productive enough to leave something behind. Another ballad from the same period, “Over You” — written by Byron Hill and Tony Hiller and produced by Foster — missed the album’s final cut and sat in the vault for a decade, before resurfacing in 1994 as the lead single from Murray’s career retrospective The Best… So Far. That a song this polished could be surplus tells you how seriously the Something to Talk About team was aiming: they were not making a country album with pop touches, but a pop album that happened to star country’s most reliable voice.
The album that resulted had a split personality that suited 1986 perfectly. Alongside the Foster single sat material like the title track, and Capitol followed “Now and Forever (You and Me)” with a second single, “Who’s Leaving Who” — evidence that the label heard the album not as a one-song experiment but as a genuine new direction. The direction would not produce another No. 1, which in hindsight only sharpens the outline of this one: the Foster collaboration caught the last of the old chart magic while pointing at the pop future Murray would visit only occasionally thereafter.
Foster’s Session, Mr. Mister’s Voice
The recording is pure Foster: at four minutes and fourteen seconds, a full-scale pop ballad rather than a country song with trimmings, with his own keyboards and synthesizers up front, guitars by Michael Landau and Bob Mann, and Murray’s voice — warmer and earthier than Foster’s usual divas — set against that polished machinery like a hearth in a glass house. Listen for the background vocal: it’s Richard Page, the lead singer of Mr. Mister. The timing is almost comic: Page’s “Broken Wings” had topped the Hot 100 in December 1985, and his “Kyrie” would do the same in March 1986, in the very weeks Murray’s single was climbing. One of the defining voices of 1986 pop is hiding in the harmonies of Anne Murray’s last country No. 1. A popular music video, filmed in Toronto, carried the song further into the MTV era than Murray had ever ventured — and gave daytime and pop audiences a visual for a singer many had only ever heard.
Ten Number Ones — and the End of an Era
Released in January 1986, with “I Don’t Wanna Spend Another Night Without You” on the B-side, the single climbed to No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart that spring, spending nineteen weeks on the chart in total. It crossed to No. 7 on the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 92 on the Hot 100 — a modest pop showing that carried an unnoticed significance: after six weeks, it left, and Murray never appeared on the Hot 100 again. In Canada it was a bigger across-the-board success: the RPM country chart dated May 3, 1986 shows it at No. 1, and it reached No. 2 on RPM adult contemporary and No. 12 on the RPM pop chart. Capitol soon enshrined it in her permanent canon, placing it on Greatest Hits Volume II in 1989 among the defining singles of her second decade.
Consider the company that tenth No. 1 put her in. By the spring of 1986, double-digit country chart-toppers were still a rare achievement for a female artist — the preserve of a small circle of the genre’s defining women. Murray had reached the mark almost without the industry noticing it happen, one unhurried single at a time, across sixteen years and three distinct eras of country music: the countrypolitan seventies, the crossover boom she helped create, and the synth-gloss eighties she closed with this record. No reinvention had ever been required; the voice and the judgment simply outlasted the fashions.
The historical footnote arrived slowly. When “Now and Forever (You and Me)” left the top of the country chart, no non-American artist replaced it there for nine years — not until Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine” in 1995. Murray, the first Canadian female solo singer ever to top a US chart, had quietly held the door for a generation.
A Soap-Opera Afterlife
The song’s glow lingered in unexpected places. The mid-1980s were the great age of the soap-opera “couple theme,” when daytime dramas assigned signature songs to their signature romances and fans bought the records to keep the fiction alive. “Now and Forever (You and Me)” was made for that world: in March 1986 it played over the closing credits of an episode of All My Children, and it became the musical signature of Sophia and C.C., a central couple on the NBC soap Santa Barbara. Daytime television had adopted it as shorthand for enduring love — millions of viewers who never bought an Anne Murray album knew exactly what this song meant. In 1994, Murray’s career-spanning box set took its name from the song: Now and Forever, four discs summing up a quarter-century, with her final No. 1 supplying the title and the thesis.
Murray kept recording and touring for two more decades — the gold-selling albums Something to Talk About, Harmony and her Christmas collections kept coming, and she remained a fixture of Canadian public life — before retiring from performing in 2008, on her own terms and with her voice intact. But the chart reign that began with “Snowbird” in 1970 ended here, with a promise set to David Foster’s keyboards: now and forever, you and me. As a farewell to the top of the charts, a singer could hardly ask for a more graceful exit line — or a more fitting song title to hang a whole career on.