A Car Mechanic Wrote This Song and the Demo Won an Oscar

Some of the songs we love to sing along to any time we her them. They are the ones we always let play when they come on the radio. Most of these hit are polished tunes, but, sometimes a diamond in the rough makes it to the top of the charts and does just as well. This is the case with a very famous track from the 1980s that most of us will loudly sing along with in the car! You might not know that this powerful song is actually a demo!

In 1986 the producers of the movie Top Gun were looking for a powerhouse song to round out the soundtrack. They already had the opening credit music chosen, but were lacking a more emotional song for balance. They enlisted Giorgio Moroder, king of disco and a master of synth, for help. This record producer had helped create many of the most famous disco songs of the 1970s, but when the fever for these tunes died out he turned his attention to soundtracks.

Moroder had already won Grammys for his work on the films Midnight Express and Flashdance, as well as for Donna Summer’s album Bad Girls, so he certainly knew how to create hits. But, for this new project his normal lyric writers were unavailable. At that time he struck up an unexpected friendship with a young car mechanic who also happened to write songs, Tom Whitlock. He gave Whitlock a copy of the music for both “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away”, hoping that something good might come from it. Whitlock delivered on both, riffing on the titles which had already been selected.

Moroder hired singer Terri Nunn from the band Berlin to sing a demo of “Take My Breath Away” as a placeholder until he could find a bigger star to record it properly. Essentially Nunn was there to show the film producers what the song could sound like. But, when Moroder heard her sing it, he knew that her version was the one he wanted. And, his instincts were spot on because the song went on to win an Academy Award as well as a Golden Globe. In fact the song was so loved by the producers that they added an extra scene to the film in order to showcase “Take My Breath Away”!

There are so many steps that go into making a song come to life, but they rarely involve a mechanic and a demo-turned-final release!

Hear more about this iconic film soundtrack in the video below from Behind the Track.

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