1974 · Behind the Songs
Stevie Wonder wrote it at his piano at half past two in the morning; she sang it like a closing argument.
The recording in context
By early 1974, Barbra Streisand was coming off one of the biggest years of her career. The Way We Were, the film, had made her a movie star all over again, and its theme song had given her one of the defining hits of the decade. The album that carried the film’s title, The Way We Were, was being assembled in a hurry, and most of it was stitched together from material she had already recorded. Only two songs were cut specifically for the record: the title theme itself, and a piano ballad borrowed from the most gifted songwriter of the moment, Stevie Wonder. That ballad was “All in Love Is Fair.”
Wonder had written “All in Love Is Fair” for his landmark 1973 album Innervisions, a record that would win the Grammy for Album of the Year. He cut the basic track in the small hours of November 10, 1972, starting at half past two in the morning with himself at the acoustic piano and guitarist Scott Edwards beside him. He added electric piano, drums, and his vocal the following April, discarded the first electric piano take, recorded a new one the next day, and mixed the finished song on April 8, 1973, at New York’s Record Plant and Mediasound studios. Set in the key of C-sharp minor and running just under four minutes, it was one of his starkest ballads: a slow piano meditation on a dying relationship, built almost entirely out of romantic clichés turned inside out.
Streisand recorded her version on December 14, 1973, at United Recorders in Los Angeles, with Tommy LiPuma producing. LiPuma, who was shaping the album’s sound, kept the arrangement close to Wonder’s original: piano-led, unhurried, with the singer out front and almost nothing between her and the lyric. Columbia released it as a single in March 1974, backed with a medley of “My Buddy” and “How About Me.” At three minutes and fifty seconds, it was a shade longer than Wonder’s own recording, and it gave Streisand something she rarely got from her singles of the period: a song written by a contemporary, in a contemporary idiom, that asked her to underplay rather than overwhelm.
Listen closely
What makes her reading remarkable is its restraint. Streisand, who could fill any room with sheer vocal force, treats Wonder’s melody almost conversationally in the verses, saving her full power for the title phrase. AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald singled out her phrasing of the hook as “unforgettable,” and it is easy to hear why: she lands on the word “fair” as if the idea itself surprises her, turning a familiar saying into a fresh wound. The lyric is built from the language of greeting cards — love is fair, all is fair — but Wonder wrote it as a catalogue of consolations that do not console, and Streisand sings it like someone discovering that in real time.
Listen to the piano underneath her. Where Wonder’s original keeps his own keyboard work at the center, the Streisand record lets the accompaniment breathe around the vocal, with small orchestral touches that never crowd the melody. It is a studio singer’s performance in the best sense: every breath placed, every vowel shaped, yet the emotion never feels calculated. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden, reviewing the single, found her version “almost as interesting as the original,” which for a cover of a Stevie Wonder ballad at the peak of his powers counts as high praise indeed.
The single’s chart journey was modest. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 30, 1974, at number 81 — flagged that week as a “Hot Shot Debut” — climbed to number 63 by April 20, slipped to 75 the following week, and then disappeared from the chart. Adult Contemporary radio was kinder: the record reached number 10 on what Billboard then called the Easy Listening chart. In Canada it debuted at 99 on the RPM chart in early April, peaked at 60 near the end of the month, and lasted five weeks; the American trade paper Cash Box placed it at number 60. For an artist who was simultaneously topping the charts with the title song from the same album, it was a quiet footnote — but footnotes sometimes outlast headlines.
The critics, at least, noticed. Billboard called the record a “musical gem.” Record World went further, declaring that “the ballad beauty from Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions album gets its definitive female reading from the superstar.” Greenwald, writing for AllMusic years later, praised it as “unforgettable.” Even the usually exacting Stephen Holden conceded its interest. The song would follow Streisand onto Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 in 1978, the boxed set Just for the Record in 1991, and The Essential Barbra Streisand in 2002 — a quiet survivor in a catalogue full of louder triumphs.
The afterlife
“All in Love Is Fair” has lived many lives beyond either Wonder’s or Streisand’s versions. Nancy Wilson made it the title song of a 1974 album; Cleo Laine cut it as a promotional single the same year; Brook Benton recorded it in 1976 and Shirley Bassey in 1975 for Good, Bad but Beautiful. Cher sang it on the very first episode of her television show in February 1975. Decades later, Cal Tjader and Carmen McRae took it up for the 1982 album Heat Wave, and Michael McDonald recorded it for his 2003 Motown collection. In Brazil, Wonder’s original even got its own seven-inch single in 1974, backed with “Too High.” Few songs of the seventies were so widely claimed, and fewer still rewarded every claimant.
Streisand herself gave the song a second commercial life the following year, when Columbia paired it with “The Way We Were” on a 1975 seven-inch single in the United States and Canada — the album’s two custom-written songs, back to back, as if to underline the point. It remains one of the most instructive covers of her career: proof that she could step into another writer’s world without redecorating it, and that restraint, in the right hands, can be the most dramatic choice of all. Put it on after Wonder’s original and hear two masters solve the same problem two different ways — his with invention, hers with interpretation.