Pat Benatar fans will be hearing some of their favorite songs in a new way early next year.
Benatar tells Billboard.com that after they get off the road in September, she and husband/co-writer Neil Giraldo plan to start recording an album featuring acoustic versions of their songs, including hits such as “Love Is a Battlefield,” “We Live for Love,” “Promises in the Dark” and “Hell Is for Children” as well as more recent fare like “Every Time I Fall Back” and “Somebody’s Baby.”
“We do a fairly large acoustic set in the show, and people really love that,” says Benatar, who will release the set on her own Bel Chiasso label. “It’s not like sitting down and just playing them acoustically; we have to reinvent them and change the arrangements. It’s fun to do because the songs are really in their bare-bones state, which is the way you wrote them. So it’s nice to hear them more like how you started them.”
But, she adds, fans won’t have trouble recognizing the songs in these stripped-down renditions. “You don’t want to diss all your old stuff,” she explains. “It’s history for people. It’s history for you. But I really like to go back and re-examine it, and things that were good always stand up.”
Benatar and Giraldo recently wrote a new song, “Passion,” which will be used in a commercial for a new Jell-O product of the same name. But their other principal project has been an autobiography, which Benatar says will focus less on their personal lives and more on “what the world was like when women were emerging on the rock scene and all the sexism and everything.”
“When it comes to that (personal) stuff, I’m so boring — you have no idea,” Benatar says with a laugh. “I’m married to the same man for 30 years, right? It’s ridiculous. So (the business) seemed like a much more interesting thing to focus on, and I think people will find it very interesting.”
