Valentine’s Day is a time for love song rankings, and one ballad has stood the test of time.
In a list of 50 songs published by Billboard, the 1981 song “Endless Love” was ranked as the number one love song of all time. The Lionel Richie, Diana Ross duet earned the top spot based on actual Billboard Hot 100 chart performance, on a list that included the BeeGees' “How Deep Is Your Love,” Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Silly Love Songs,” and the Partridge Family's bubblegum pop hit, "I Think I Love You.”
“Endless Love” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks starting on Aug. 15, 1981. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Movie Song and also ranks as Billboard’s Hot 100 top duet of all time.
Not bad for a song that was originally pitched as an instrumental.
In the 1970s, Lionel Richie was best known as a lead singer and main songwriter for the Commodores. He was the man behind the Motown group’s hits “Easy,” “Three Times a Lady,” and more, but by the 1980s, he was eyeing a solo career.
Around that time, producer Jon Peters and director Franco Zeffirelli asked Richie to compose an instrumental for their romantic drama film Endless Love, starring Brooke Shieldsand Martin Hewitt.
Zeffirelli later asked Richie to add lyrics to the piece and make it a duet with a female singer, Billboard noted. Ross was added to the project, and history was made.
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In an interview with Greatest Hits Radio's Jackie Brambles, Richie admitted he was “freaking out” when Ross was suggested to sing on the duet. “Diana Ross is the top of the food chain, number one, and number two I have never written a duet before in my life,” he shared.
Richie also noted that he had limited time to record the song because he was still working on albums with the Commodores and Kenny Rogers at the time. “Through all this craziness, it became a hit record of a lifetime,” he said of “Endless Love.”
“And the rest is history,” Richie added. “But if you ask me right now how it came about, that was divine guidance, because I didn’t know how it was going to come out, but it came out beyond my wildest imagination.”
In her 1993 memoir Secrets of the Sparrow, Ross admitted that her working relationship with Richie was “difficult” because she was a perfectionist and he was “not always on time.” She added, “He was an incredible songwriter, and now he was looking to do a duet in order to introduce him as a solo artist. I was already a solo performer when we recorded his song ‘Endless Love.’”
“Endless Love [the movie] did not do well,” Ross noted. “The song was brilliant and, as with Mahogany, the song did better than the film.”
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