Heart – Crazy On You
About The Song
Heart lead singer Ann Wilson wrote the “Crazy On You” lyric about finding solace from the stressful state of the world in the arms of her boyfriend, Heart guitarist Mike Fisher (he eventually stopped performing and became their sound man). Ann was in her mid-20s and didn’t see a bright future for her generation (sound familiar?). At the time, the Vietnam War was still going on, crime was rising, and there were gas shortages. She sings out her fears in the first verse:
If we still have time, we might still get by
Every time I think about it, I want to cry
With bombs and the devil, and the kids keep comin’
No way to breathe easy, no time to be young
But she was in love, so she made the song about Mike as a way of saying “thank God I have you.” The song turns sensual, with Wilson coming to the conclusion that all she can do in these seemingly apocalyptic times is go crazy on the man of her dreams.
Part of Heart’s debut album, Dreamboat Annie, “Crazy On You” was their first single in America, but it first got noticed in Canada, as they were based in Vancouver at the time and signed to a small Canadian label called Mushroom. The song garnered airplay on the Montreal radio station CHOM, where a prominent DJ named Doug Pringle championed it. As Heart toured Canada in late 1975, the song gained momentum in that country. When they toured America in the spring and summer of 1976, Mushroom promoted the song in regions where they were playing. The song had lots of hotspots around the country, but they flared up at different times so it peaked at just #35 in the US in June 1976. The next single, “Magic Man,” reached #9 in November as Heart gained a foothold. By the end of the year, Dreamboat Annie had sold a million copies in the US, earning Heart a major-label deal with CBS. By this time they had relocated to Seattle.
Nancy Wilson recalled how the instrumentation was inspired by a classic Moody Blues tune.
“I remember I had a bad flu and was kind of delirious,” she said. “The lyric was so great that it kind of lifted me up in my sick bed. Two days later I was better, and we started to set it to music. We were listening to a lot of Moody Blues back then. There was a song called Question that had this fast, fiery guitar rhythm. That was our idea for the groove. Then Roger Fisher came up with the really cool riff over A-minor to F, and that gave it some more beautiful momentum.”
