Lady Gaga‘s hit “Hold My Hand” is from the hit movie Top Gun: Maverick. She submitted the song to the film’s creative team in hopes that, as director Joe Kosinski tells ABC Audio, it would be just as popular as that Oscar-winning #1 ballad by Berlin from the original movie.
“We said we were looking for … the ‘Take My Breath Away’ of this film, which is a very, very high bar,” Kosinski explains. “I mean, can you imagine trying to take that on? Like, who throws their hat in the ring to try to match such an iconic thing? And [Gaga] did it. I mean, she crushed it!”
Ironically, “Take My Breath Away” was a fluke. As Berlin‘s Teri Nunn tells ABC Audio, they only got to record the song because Giorgio Moroder, who wrote and produced it, happened to be working with them at the same time he got hired to put the Top Gun soundtrack together.
As Nunn explains, “He tried a number of other singers on the song, and the producers didn’t like any of them. Big singers, you know, way bigger than me. So he was kind of out of options.”
So, she says, Moroder gave her the song to record and promised the producers it’d be great.
Nunner laughs, “I was so sure that I had no shot at this that … I changed his melodies. It was really stupid of me to do that … I was like, ‘I’m not going to get it.’ So … I gave it back to him and said, ‘OK, this is the way I would do it.’
“He played it for them and they said, ‘That’s it! That’s the one! … You found your singer, you found your band. Let’s do it!'”
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