Where were you in the ’80s? Even if you were too young to remember or not even born yet, music from the decade continues to resonate today.
Reading the bestseller “I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties” (Permuted Press) by Hall of Fame hit songwriter Holly Knight (with a Foreword by Tina Turner) brought me right back to the big hair, even bigger shoulder pads and the great music of the era.
If you watched the show “Schitt’s Creek” you heard the beautiful song, “The Best”; if you saw the Jennifer Garner movie “13 Going on 30” you likely sang along with “Love is a Battlefield”; and if you ever rocked out to Turner singing “Better Be Good to Me,” you have enjoyed just a few of the huge hits written or co-written by Knight. I couldn’t help but hear the chorus of the title song, “I Am the Warrior,” running through my head while reading the book.
From difficult childhood to songwriting elite
This is the story of a young girl with a dream and the story of the music scene of an iconic decade. Knight dedicates the book “to anyone who ever had a dream and was told ‘No.’”
Growing up in New York City, Knight’s childhood home was filled with music, and she started piano lessons at a very early age. Her parents divorced while she was young, and she struggled with a very difficult and abusive relationship with her mother. “Thinking back on all this craziness, what I find most compelling is how common maternal abuse was amongst creative women back then, so much so that it almost seems cliché, or, at best, a rite of passage. It certainly ignited something fierce in me that said, I will not be like you. I will be the opposite of you, and I will be special.”
Asked by an interviewer once why so many of her songs are about fighting or going into battle, Knight, realizing he was right, reflected: “…my songs were more about fighting for something, rather than with someone.”
Knight’s story is inspiring. She went from a 14-year-old girl working at a Sam Ash Music Store to one of songwriting’s elite in a time when being a woman in the industry was a true anomaly. She has written some of the most recognizable hit songs and has worked with well-known artists in addition to Tina Turner such as Pat Benatar, Heart, Rod Stewart, KISS, Bon Jovi and Steven Tyler, just to name a few. In her story, you get a behind-the-scenes look at the music scene of the 1980s and some of the world’s biggest stars.
I loved reading about the songwriting process itself and often stopped to listen to the songs Knight talks about. In fact, in the audiobook, which the author narrates, readers can also enjoy never-before-released snippets of the original demos to some of her biggest hits like “The Best” and “The Warrior.” All the songs are a testament to Knight’s incredible talent.
As to why, of all her famous songs, Knight chose “I Am the Warrior” as the title of her book, she says that when she first wrote this song, she didn’t know that it would be a big hit, nor did she know that it would “serve as a kind of theme song for the rest of my life. It didn’t feel autobiographical when I wrote it, but as I’ve learned, sometimes we don’t write songs – the songs write us.”
If you grew up with any of these iconic songs, you will love this well-written real-life tale of the ’80s music scene. As Knight reminds us: “Music has a way of transporting us, catapulting us into the future or taking us back to a time long past, back to what was happening the first time we heard someone sing something that profoundly changed our lives forever.” “I Am the Warrior” will certainly transport you as it did me!
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