Some songs take the long way round. Emotion began its life in Paris as Amoureuse, a young French singer-songwriter’s confession of passion and fear. It crossed the Channel carrying one English lyric and became a British hit for Kiki Dee. Then it crossed the Atlantic carrying a completely different English lyric, written by a Texan who had rebuilt the song from the melody outwards. Only then, in January 1975, did it become a Helen Reddy single — and Reddy, the most reliable adult-contemporary hitmaker in America, promptly took this twice-translated French ballad to No. 1 on the Easy Listening chart, the sixth consecutive No. 1 she scored there.
Amoureuse: Passion and Fear
Véronique Sanson was barely into her twenties when she introduced Amoureuse on her 1972 album of the same name, her debut; the song was released as a single in March 1972. By her own account it came to her while she was driving, and it has the headlong feel of something written in motion. Its title — a French feminine noun meaning a woman in love — never actually appears in the lyric, which describes instead the contradictory weather of a new love affair: desire and dread in equal measure, a woman who has been hurt before walking back into the fire anyway. It was a sophisticated piece of writing, and it made her a star in France. It also travelled early: a cover version recorded for the Quebec market by France Castel reached No. 1 on Canada’s French-language chart in December 1972 — the song’s first journey across the Atlantic, though not its last, and not yet in English.
Two English Lyrics, and Kiki Dee
The first English rendering was the work of lyricist Gary Osborne, who kept Sanson’s chorus largely faithful while reimagining the verses. Sanson recorded this version herself, releasing it as a single in Britain in September 1972 and in the United States that November. It was Kiki Dee, though, who made it a hit. Dee had already made a small piece of history as the first British singer signed to Motown, and at the suggestion of Tony King, a vice president at Elton John’s Rocket Records, she recorded Amoureuse in April 1973 for her Rocket album Loving and Free, which Elton John himself produced. Issued as a single on 31 August 1973, her version took its time — entering the UK chart in November and peaking at No. 13 that December — and along the way it comfortably saw off a rival cover by Polly Brown, rushed out that September. It was Dee’s first real chart success, the beginning of a decade that would take her to I’ve Got the Music in Me and to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, her duet with Elton John. By the end of 1973, Amoureuse was a proven hit in English, under its French title, with Osborne’s words — Osborne himself would later co-write Elton John’s Blue Eyes, a fitting footnote for a lyricist whose career kept intersecting with Rocket’s. America, when it finally took the song, would hear an entirely different set of lyrics over the same aching melody. Two complete English versions of one French song, written within months of each other by lyricists working independently, is a genuine rarity in pop — a fork in the road where both paths led to a hit, on different sides of the ocean.
Patti Dahlstrom Writes “Emotion”
The second translation began at Warner Brothers’ publishing company, where executive Artie Wayne sent a copy of Sanson’s Amoureuse album to his friend Patti Dahlstrom, a singer-songwriter from Texas, with a simple suggestion: this melody deserves English words. Dahlstrom later recalled being mesmerised by the music, and the new lyric came quickly. But what she wrote was not a translation at all. Where Sanson had sung of a new affair’s fear and longing, Dahlstrom’s Emotion — the word sits at the centre of her lyric — gives voice to a woman in an established relationship with an inconsiderate lover, a relationship redeemed, again and again, by the passion of the couple’s reunions. Same melody, same emotional temperature, different woman, different story.
Dahlstrom introduced the song on her own album The Way I Am, recorded in August 1973, and it was issued as a single that October — to no chart success at all. She recorded four albums during the 1970s without ever breaking through as a performer, and Emotion might have vanished with the rest of her catalogue; instead it became the song other singers are remembered by, and a 2010 compilation, Emotion: The Music of Patti Dahlstrom, was eventually assembled around it. But Dahlstrom moved in the right circles: she was a friend of Paul Williams, the songwriter whose work Reddy recorded constantly, and it was through that orbit that Emotion reached the singer who would make it famous.
Reddy Takes It to Number One
Reddy recorded Emotion for her 1974 album Free and Easy — her second album of that year, and the one that also carried Angie Baby, which spent the last week of 1974 at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Between them, the album’s two singles supplied two of her Easy Listening No. 1s. As the follow-up single, Emotion was released in January 1975 in an abridged edit running two minutes and fifty-four seconds, with I’ve Been Wanting You So Long on the B-side. Its chart run told a revealing story about where Reddy stood in early 1975. The single debuted on the Hot 100 on 8 February at No. 72 and climbed to a peak of No. 22 on 22 March — respectable, but the first time since before I Am Woman that a Reddy single had missed the Top 20, and a quiet signal that her pop momentum was beginning to cool. Record World placed it at No. 37.
On the Easy Listening chart, however, there was no cooling at all. Emotion reached No. 1 in the week of 29 March 1975 — the sixth of the eight No. 1s Reddy would accumulate on that chart, and the last of her unbroken run of six consecutive chart-toppers there, a streak stretching back to Delta Dawn in 1973. The pattern the single announced played out across the rest of 1975: Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady still managed No. 8 on the Hot 100, but Bluebird stalled at No. 35 and Somewhere in the Night at No. 19 — the pop peaks were lowering even as the Easy Listening No. 1s kept arriving right on schedule. The split verdict of the two charts became the defining pattern of the rest of her career: the pop audience would gradually wander off, but the adult-contemporary audience — the one that bought the albums, filled the Las Vegas showrooms and kept her on television — never wavered. The point was underlined at the end of that same year, when Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits climbed to No. 5 in America and stayed on the album chart for fifty-one weeks on its way to double platinum: the compilations audience, like the Easy Listening audience, was in it for the duration.
A Performance Poised Between Two Lyrics
What Reddy brought to the song, finally, was poise. Dahlstrom’s lyric describes a woman at the mercy of her own feelings, grateful for scraps of passion from a man who gives her little else; sung badly, it could sound abject. Reddy sings it the way she sang everything in those years — level, lucid, faintly amused at her own predicament — and the effect is to give the narrator her dignity back. You believe this woman has weighed the relationship, found it wanting in every department but one, and chosen it anyway with her eyes open. It is the same quality that had made her I Am Woman persuasive rather than hectoring: an absolute refusal to plead. In a song that had already been a Frenchwoman’s confession and an Englishwoman’s torch number, Reddy found the third reading — the American one, cool on the surface, with the emotion of the title banked down underneath it like coals.
The Version Véronique Sanson Loved Best
The song’s journey had one more graceful turn. Shirley Bassey was among the other singers who recorded Dahlstrom’s Emotion, while back in France the original Amoureuse settled into its permanent place as the signature song of Sanson’s long career — the melody thus living two entirely separate lives under two titles, in two languages, each version definitive to the audience that grew up with it. and in 2009 — thirty-seven years after she had written the original — Véronique Sanson told the French magazine Platine that Dahlstrom’s version, the one Helen Reddy had carried to No. 1 in America, remains her favourite version of Amoureuse. It is a fitting verdict on a song that succeeded by being rewritten: a French original about the fear of falling in love, an English lyric about the difficulty of staying in it, and in Reddy’s reading, a performance poised exactly between the two — tender, worldly and quietly unconquered. Few records better display the gift on which her career was built. Reddy rarely wrote her biggest songs; what she could do, better than almost anyone of her era, was recognise a great one when it arrived — even when it arrived from Paris, by way of London, wearing somebody else’s words.