#47: We Live For Love by Pat Benatar

City: Regina, SK
Radio Station: CKCK
Peak Month: June 1980
Peak Position in Regina ~ #5
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube: “We Live For Love”
Lyrics: “We Live For Love”

Patricia Mae Andrzejewski was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953. She was raised near the city of Babylon, Long Island. Her dad was a sheet-metal worker and her mom was a beautician. At the age of eight she began to take voice lessons. After high school, she spent a year to study health education, but dropped out to marry high school sweetheart Dennis Benatar, who was drafted into the United States Army. She was 19. While her husband was stationed at Fort Lee, Virginia, she worked as a bank teller near Richmond (VA). She quit her job and formed the Pat Benatar Band. Dennis Benatar was discharged from the Army and the couple moved to New York in May 1975 so Benatar could pursue a singing career. She performed at an amateur night at the Catch a Rising Star comedy club in Manhattan. Later in 1975, Pat Benatar got a part in Harry Chapin’s rock musical The Zinger showing at a theatre in Huntington Station, Long Island.

Benatar did commercial jingles for Pepsi-Cola and got the attention of several record company executives impressed with her performances at local clubs in Manhattan. In 1979 Pat and Dennis Benatar got a divorce, though she kept his name. Later that year her debut album, In the Heat of the Night, was a critical success. The single, “Heartbreaker” became a Top 20 hit in Canada. In the summer of 1980 another single, “We Live For Love”, was released.

Neil Geraldo wrote “We Live For Love”. He was born in Cleveland in 1955. He began to collaborate with Pat Benatar in 1979 and the two were married in 1982. He had previously been in Rick Derringer’s band. The song is about a romantic couple whose passionate fire sustains them as they ‘live for love.’

“We Live For Love” climbed to #3 in Philadelphia, #5 in Regina (SK), and Dallas, #6 in Buffalo, #7 in St. Cloud (MN), and Springfield (MA), #8 in Corpus Christi (TX), Phoenix, Vancouver (BC), Saskatoon (SK), and Lancaster (PA), #9 in Seattle, #10 in San Diego, Windsor (ON), Hamilton (ON), Richmond (IN), and Los Angeles, #11 in Baltimore and Atlanta, and #12 in Winnipeg (MB).

In 1980, her album Crimes of Passion earned her a Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. She beat out Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English. Her single, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” climbed to #9 on the Hot 100. In 1981, Benatar released Precious Time. The debut single was “Fire And Ice”.

In 1983, Benatar won her third Grammy Award, again in the Best Female Rock Vocal Performance category, this time for “Shadows of the Night”. The song was featured in the film Times Square, whose plot concerned two runaways who end up in Manhattan.

In 1983 Benatar released her album Live from Earth. Though it was a live album from her world tour in 1982, it contained two studio tracks. One of these was “Love Is A Battlefield”. It won her a fourth Best Female Rock Vocal Performance Grammy Award. The single peaked at #1 in Halifax (NS) and #5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Her next hit single, “We Belong”, also peaked at #5 on the Hot 100, and climbed to #2 in Edmonton (AB) and Regina (SK), and #3 in Vancouver (BC). The single earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, which she lost out to Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love For You”. As well in 1985, she earned a fifth nomination in the Best Female Rock Vocal Performance category at the Grammy Awards. But her song “Invincible” lost out to Tina Turner and “One of the Living”.

Benatar received more Grammy Award nominations in successive years for “Sex As A Weapon” (1987) and “All Fired Up” (1988) losing to Tina Turner three years in a row. “All Fired Up” was her last charting single on the Billboard Hot 100.

Her recording of “Let’s Stay Together” became her eighth nomination at the Grammy Awards for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Though the track from her album Wide Awake in Dreamland won critical acclaim, it failed to chart.

In June 2010, Benatar’s memoir, Between a Heart and a Rock Place, was released.

On April 12, 2016, Giraldo and Benatar were honored with the Artistic Award of Courage, celebrating both artists for their advocacy toward the ending of child abuse. The pair were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.

January 9, 2026
Ray McGinnis

References:
“About Pat Benatar,” benatargiraldo.com.
Nicole Kappatos, “From the Archives: Pat Benatar’s rise to fame began in Richmond,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 11, 2017.
“Pat Benatar,” Hip, January 5, 2008.
Glenn Gamboa, “Pat Benatar takes her best shot in new book,” Newsday, June 14, 2010.
“Pat Benatar Canada Concert Dates,” setlist.fm.

Top 40 CKCK 620-AM Regina (SK) June 20, 1980