It begins after midnight, or at least that is how it sounds: a slow, dreamy groove, keyboards and saxophone drifting like smoke through a dark room, and then a voice — husky, weary, unmistakably Kim Carnes — telling a man, plainly and without cruelty, that he has got the wrong woman. When Kim Carnes released “Mistaken Identity” as a single in the autumn of 1981, it was not the song anyone expected to follow the biggest hit of the year. It was quiet where its predecessor had been sharp, wounded where its predecessor had been cool, and it asked for something pop radio rarely grants: patience. It peaked at number 60 and disappeared from the charts in six weeks. But the story of “Mistaken Identity” is worth telling precisely because it was not a smash. It is the story of a songwriter stepping out from behind her own blockbuster, at three in the morning, in a Los Angeles studio, and singing a song she had written herself — a song about being seen as someone you are not, recorded in the shadow of a hit that had made the whole world see its singer in a single, fixed image.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Kim Carnes stood in 1981. She was not a newcomer, and she was not, until that year, a star. She was a Los Angeles singer-songwriter born on July 20, 1945, who had been releasing records for a full decade, starting with her debut album Rest on Me in 1971, and who had built a respected career mostly out of other people’s attention: writing songs that other singers covered, singing backup, and waiting for a record of her own to break through. Her 1980 album Romance Dance had reached number 57 on the charts and given her a first solo Top 10 hit with her version of Smokey Robinson’s “More Love.” It was a solid record, but it was not a breakthrough. Then came the album that changed everything, and the song that changed it most was one she had not written.
That album was Mistaken Identity, her sixth studio album, released in April 1981 by EMI America Records and produced by Val Garay. Garay was, by then, one of the most in-demand producers in Los Angeles, and Carnes had specifically asked him to produce the new album after he had been brought in to mix Romance Dance. The sessions took place at Garay’s own studio, Record One in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, in two week-long bursts in December 1980 and January 1981. For the most part, the album was recorded live in the studio, with the band playing together in the room; Carnes later said they would usually get a take on the second or third try. It was, by her own account, a complete collaborative effort — a band record credited to a solo artist — and its sound, built on Bill Cuomo’s keyboards, Craig Krampf’s drums and Waddy Wachtel’s guitar, fused the new wave sheen of the moment with the warmth of a working rock band.
The album’s lead single was “Bette Davis Eyes,” written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, and it became one of the defining records of the decade. It spent nine non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, finished 1981 as the year’s biggest song, and won the Grammy Awards for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. The parent album followed it to the top: Mistaken Identity reached number one on the Billboard 200 on June 27, 1981, stayed there for four weeks, finished the year as the fifteenth best-selling album, and was certified platinum. The album itself was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year, and Garay was nominated as Producer of the Year. Carnes, who had spent ten years as a working songwriter and singer, was suddenly, at thirty-five, an overnight sensation in ten years — and the whole world knew her as the woman with the husky voice who sang about Bette Davis.
That is what makes the title track so interesting, and so quietly brave. “Mistaken Identity” was written by Carnes herself — the only solo writing credit among the album’s singles — and it could hardly be more different from the hit that preceded it. Where “Bette Davis Eyes” is all cool appraisal, a woman sizing up a man with a famous actress’s eyes, “Mistaken Identity” is a confession from the other side of the mirror. Its narrator is a woman telling a lover that he is not really seeing her at all: that he is looking for someone else in her face, that she is not the girl he wants her to be, and that the whole affair rests on a case of mistaken identity. It is a song about the loneliness of being loved for the wrong reasons, sung by a woman who had just become famous for a single image — a blonde in a video, a voice on the radio — that millions of people now carried in their heads. Whether Carnes intended the parallel or not, the song lands differently once you know the context: the biggest hit of her life had given the public a fixed idea of who she was, and here she was, on the very same album, singing about what it feels like to be mistaken for someone else.
The recording itself has one of the best stories of any session of that year, and Carnes has told it herself. The title track, in its original incarnation, was up-tempo — and it did not feel right. The band moved on to another song. Then, at about three in the morning, Cuomo, one of her keyboard players, started playing the song again with a slow, wonderful groove, and one by one the band drifted out of wherever they had gone and started playing along. Carnes started singing, and Garay put a microphone in the middle of the room and turned on the tape recorder. The version that made the album — arranged by Cuomo, with harmony vocals from Dave Ellingson, running four minutes and forty-nine seconds — is, in effect, that middle-of-the-night performance: a band finding a song by slowing it down until its sadness showed. Record World, reviewing the single, heard exactly that quality, writing that dreamy sax and keyboard colors provided the backdrop for Carnes’s vocal longing. It is a record that sounds like the hour it was made in: late, unguarded, and a little haunted.
The single’s chart story, told honestly, is a short one, and it is the honest part that matters. “Mistaken Identity” was the album’s third single, after “Bette Davis Eyes” and “Draw of the Cards,” which had reached number 28. The title track entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated October 24, 1981, at number 83, climbed to a peak of number 60 on November 14, 1981, and left the chart after six weeks. It did not reach the Top 40 anywhere else of note, and it earned no gold record and no Grammy nomination of its own. By the ordinary arithmetic of pop, it was a disappointment — the third single from a number one album, released into a market that had already decided it wanted “Bette Davis Eyes” and not much else from Kim Carnes. But chart arithmetic misses what the song was for. Not every track on a blockbuster album is meant to be a blockbuster. Some are there to tell you who the artist is when the spotlight moves on, and “Mistaken Identity” is that kind of track: the songwriter’s own song, placed third on the album’s first side, right after the hit, as if to say, here is the rest of me.
Its afterlife has been quieter than the hit’s, but it has never quite gone away. The song has stayed in print on every edition of the album, and it turns up on Carnes compilations — including Gypsy Honeymoon: The Best of Kim Carnes, where the 1981 recording sits alongside the hits as proof that the album was more than its lead single. Critics revisiting the album have kept returning to it: uDiscover Music, telling the story of Carnes’s rise, singles out her own title track as a song that retains its subtle power, and Rock and Roll Globe’s fortieth-anniversary reassessment of the album praises Garay’s production as a fusion of new wave and early eighties album rock, a sound the title track wears as well as anything on the record. Carnes herself moved on to the follow-up album Voyeur in 1982, whose title track reached number 29, and to a long career as a songwriter and performer that continued well past her chart peak. She never had another hit as big as “Bette Davis Eyes” — no one could have — but she never stopped writing, either, and “Mistaken Identity” remains the clearest evidence on her biggest album that the voice behind the hit was, first and last, a songwriter’s voice.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to that three-in-the-morning session. Pop history is full of songs that were chased, polished and focus-grouped into hits, and “Bette Davis Eyes” itself was, in its way, a triumph of arrangement: a seven-year-old song rebuilt in a day around a keyboard lick. “Mistaken Identity” is the opposite kind of triumph. Nobody chased it. It failed as an up-tempo number, it was abandoned for the night, and then it came back on its own terms, slow and sad, because a keyboard player could not leave it alone and a singer was still awake to sing it. The microphone in the middle of the room caught something that a more careful session might have polished away: the sound of a woman singing, without hurry, about not being who someone wants her to be, backed by a band that had finally learned how to play the song the way it wanted to be played.
That is why “Mistaken Identity” still works, more than forty years later, for listeners who have never bought the album and never will. It is not the biggest song on Mistaken Identity, and it is not the most famous song Kim Carnes ever sang. It is the one that tells the truth about fame itself: that being seen is not the same as being known, and that the most honest thing a singer can do, in the afterglow of a hit that fixed her image in millions of minds, is to sing, softly, at three in the morning, about being mistaken for someone else. The charts gave it six weeks and a peak of number 60. The album gave it the title. And in the long story of Kim Carnes, that title may be the most honest thing on the record.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the groove settles into its slow, dreamy pace. It is the sound of a song that refused to hurry — and of a singer who, at the height of her fame, chose to sing about being misread.