Happy Birthday Pat Benatar

Pat Benatar's "Innamorata" came 20 years into her long-lived career, and when I interviewed her for Billboard in 1998 for an Artists & Music piece in Billboard, she was obviously ready to move toward a more organic sound post-80s' hits: "This is like night and day compared to the first album," she said. "This was a conscious, organic thing. The lyrics are age-appropriate. We definitely didn't want to go backwards."

Before that, in 1997, I interviewed Benatar—who tuned 58 on Monday—for my AirWaves column and we focused more on the past. When I wrote my final column in 1998, I deemed her "Best '80s Quote" and remarked on the fact that she laughed irreverently through much of the interview.

I wrote in the column, "The lady laughed her ass off and giggled irreverently at her own past. Regarding her infamous videoclip for 'Love Is A Battlefield,' she commented, 'It took them 15 hours a day for two days to get me not to fuck up. I think I had to do it a billion times. By the time we were finished, even my toenails were crippled.'"