![Chris Hayes [left] wears a purple checked shirt and plays his 1957 Stratocaster in the studio; Michael J. Fox tears it up onstage as Marty McFly in the 1985 blockbuster Back To The Future.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/nWZUSbFAwA6EqQdruLmXXh-1920-80.jpg.webp)
The Power Of Love was a track that Huey Lewis and the News were not all that interested in writing. They were busy. They had a record to make. And besides, they didn’t know how to write for the movies. But all things considered, it worked out for them.
One of two tracks the band contributed to the Back To The Future soundtrack, the Power Of Love scored them their first number one. They got nominated for an Academy Award. And such was the single’s success that it put pressure on director Robert Zemeckis to finish the movie and get it out.
Speaking to Mason Marangella for the Vertex Effects YouTube channel, Chris Hayes, the former Huey Lewis and the News guitarist, has been reflecting on some of the biggest tracks of his career – included that copyright brouhaha over I Want A New Drug and Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme song – and revealed how his approach to The Power Of Love could not have been more low-key. He wasn’t even dressed when he wrote it.
“I just played the guitar part on my couch – in my pyjamas, I’m pretty sure,” he says.
I just played the guitar part on my couch – in my pyjamas
But then, writing a song for a movie was not at the forefront of their minds in the summer of 1985 as they were holed up at the Record Plant, in Sausalito, California, putting together album number four – which of course would be titled Fore! because why not, right, it was the ‘80s and Huey Lewis and the News always had a light touch.
“We were recording that album and they came to us and said, ‘We are looking for a song for this movie.’ There was this script… Back To The Future,” says Hayes. “We’re looking at the movie going, ‘Urgh! It’s kinda cheesy. I don’t know if this is going to work, but what the hell.’ So somebody wrote a song. I think it might have been Johnny [Colla]. We pitched that to them and they didn’t like it so much. Then they said, ‘Hayes, take a crack at it.’ And so I went and took a shot at it.”
While relaying this story, Hayes even has the electric guitar he used for the song with him, a 1957 Fender Stratocaster that cost him just $1,200 and would now be worth around 50,000 grand in mint condition. “I thought I was paying way too much money for it back then,” he says. It comes in handy as he demonstrates some of the chord choices that would crop up in the middle-eight. As Marangella notes, it gets a little far-out there. All Hayes was looking for was good guitar part to hang the sound around.
“I was all about guitar parts. I wanted to get something rhythm-y and kinda funky sounding,” says Hayes. “So I just came up with that guitar part and went, ‘Okay, that’s going to work.’ Then I just kinda threw together pretty much the whole song because it’s not brain surgery. It’s not like it’s some amazing piece of music.”
Colla would add the famous keyboard stabs, Lewis the lyrics, and it was good to go, released within weeks of its recording. Zemeckis was in such a hurry to get Back To The Future completed that they used the demo version in the film.
Hayes is doing himself a disservice here. What about that middle-eight? Marangella tells Hayes he was getting a little Allan Holdsworth with his chord choices. Hayes says it was all about telling a story with the chords, playing off the song’s key in C minor and resolving it in Eb major, using some voicings that are not commonly found in pop music, not then and certainly not now.
“I like jazz stuff and I had to fight a lot to get that chord in there but they let me do it,” says Hayes. “I was always trying to add weird chords to the mix. I grew up playing with [Dave] Liebman and Pee Wee Ellis, and a lot of jazz stuff, so I was always trying to inject that stuff in there and they were always resisting.”
The only bummer? That Lionel Richie beat them to the Oscar, winning the 1986 Academy Award for Best Original Song for Say You, Say Me from White Nights. Richie was also up for Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister) from The Color Purple.
“I was just I wasn’t mad, but it was like, God, that would have been cool to win that Oscar,” says Hayes. “But I do have the nomination, so that’s pretty cool.”
You can check out the full interview above and subscribe to the Vertex Effects YouTube channel here.
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