Belinda Carlisle, lead singer of the girl group synonymous with early 1980s pop, The Go-Go’s, later left for a solo career. Stereogum reports that in December 1987, “Carlisle had the #1 single in America, and she had it with a fiercely, fervently, almost defiantly mainstream song. Carlisle’s big hit is a simple, straightforward love song built around terms so overstated that they cross over into actual religious territory. In the video, Carlisle makes out with her husband, a Hollywood scion who was once part of the Republican political machine … (In the decade proceeding the hit), Belinda Carlisle went full normie. Along the way, though, she made a hell of an impact.”
“‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth’ is a glimmering, expensive-sounding pop record, with that shiny-synth/big-drum thing that you hear on practically every successful record of the era … On his Hit Parade podcast a couple of years ago, Chris Molanphy points out that (songwriters Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley) took that trick from Bon Jovi, who’d used it on ‘You Give Love A Bad Name.’ Later on, that chorus-up-front move became a go-to trick for late-’90s boy-band producers. It’s some effective shit! When a chorus is big enough, there’s no need to be subtle about it. You can just bludgeon it directly into somebody’s brain before the song even starts.” Songwriter Ellen Shipley sang backup on the song, as did Diane Warren and Michelle Phillips (of The Mamas and The Papas fame); synth-driven songwriter and music tech groundbreaker Thomas Dolby served as a session keyboardist for the track. Stereogum continues: “You almost certainly can’t pick out those individual voices or keyboard tones … but you can definitely hear that there’s money in the song … it’s the sound of ’80s blockbuster pop cranked all the way up to full power. It sounds like Top Gun.”
After a start in E major, 3:23 brings an unprepared shift upward to F# major — if “unprepared” is a broad enough term to include a bombastic instrumental chorus (starting at 3:09), plenty of percussion pyrotechnics, an insistent re-statement of the keyboard hook, and a 2/4 bar thrown into the 4/4 mix to bring us to the key change with the g-force of a hairpin rollercoaster turn.
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