PATTY SMYTH : A Successful Rock ‘n’ Roll Resurrection

In the late ‘80s, singer Patty Smyth was deep in a slump.

Her major mid-’80s success with pop-rock songs like “The Warrior” and “Goodbye to You” was well behind her. Finally, she made an album for Columbia Records that, she recalls, “They didn’t like and I didn’t really like either.” It was never released, hastening her move to MCA Records.

Though she didn’t know it at the time, that unreleased album contained the key to her future--the song “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough.”

Re-recorded last year as a duet with Don Henley for her first MCA album, “Patty Smyth,” the song turned out to be a No. 1 single, resurrecting her career. It also has been nominated for a pop-duet Grammy.

Smyth acknowledges a debt to Henley. “Without Don--good song or not--it would have been much harder to get this single on the radio,” she says.

Ironically, the singer first met Henley during the original recording sessions for the song four years ago.

“He was working in the same studio,” she recalls. “I played ‘Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough’ for him. It was a song I was proud of, the first song (I wrote) that I thought was really good--one that I wouldn’t be ashamed to play for a great songwriter like Henley. He liked it and I thought maybe he’d sing something on it. We didn’t know at the time he’d be singing on it four years later.”

Their hit version of the song is slow and melancholy--quite unlike the original. “The song was a power-rock ballad at first,” Smyth says. “That’s the kind of song I was supposed to be singing back then--when I was supposed to be a rocker only.”

Fronting the band Scandal, the New York native, 35, was one of the major female rockers in the early ‘80s--a role she never relished.

“I did those songs OK but I always wanted to do a variety of music,” she says. “I still sing rock. I sing some on this album, but people who have just heard the hit don’t realize that.”

“Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough” was pivotal for her in more ways than one.

“When I first wrote that song--and I’d been writing for years--it gave me confidence,” she explains. “It wasn’t fluffy, the melodies were good and it said something. Things looked real bleak at the time. I needed fuel to keep on going. The confidence I got from writing that song provided a whole lot of that fuel.”