I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties by Holly Knight (with foreword by Tina Turner)
What's It About?
Holly Knight’s singular music career included crafting a good part of the soundtrack to the MTV 80s with mega-hits for Tina Turner (“The Best”), Pat Benatar (“Love Is A Battlefield”), and Patty Smyth (“The Warrior”) — songs that celebrated female empowerment and shaped pop and rock for years to come.Where were you in the 80s? Even if you were too young to remember or not even born yet, music from this decade continues to resonate today. These are songs we loved back then and still love today.
Reading the best-seller, I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties (Permuted Press) by Hall of Fame hit songwriter, Holly Knight (with a Foreword by Tina Turner), brought me right back to the big hair, even bigger shoulder pads and the great music of that era (that we still listen to today!). If you watched the show Schitt’s Creek you heard the beautiful song, “The Best,” if you saw the Jennifer Garner movie, 13 Going on 30, you likely sang along with “Love is a Battlefield,” and if you ever rocked out to Tina Turner singing “Better Be Good to Me” you have enjoyed just a few of the huge hits written or co-written by Holly Knight. I couldn’t help but hear the chorus of the title song, “I Am the Warrior” running through my head while reading the book!
From Difficult Childhood to One of Songwriting’s Elite
This is the story of a young girl with a dream and the story of the music scene of an iconic decade. Holly dedicates the book “to anyone who ever had a dream and was told ‘No’.”
Growing up in New York City, Holly’s childhood home was filled with music and she started piano lessons at a very early age. Her parents divorced while she was young, and she struggled with a very difficult and abusive relationship with her mother. “Thinking back on all this craziness, what I find most compelling is how common maternal abuse was amongst creative women back then, so much so that it almost seems cliché, or, at best, a rite of passage. It certainly ignited something fierce in me that said, I will not be like you. I will be the opposite of you, and I will be special.”
Asked by an interviewer once why so many of her songs are about fighting or going into battle, Holly, realizing he was right, reflected: “…my songs were more about fighting for something, rather than with someone.”
Holly’s story is inspiring. She went from a 14-year-old girl working at a Sam Ash Music Store to one of songwriting’s elite – in a time when being a woman in the industry was a true anomaly. She has written some of the most recognizable hit songs and has worked with well-known artists, such as Pat Benatar, Heart, Rod Stewart, KISS, Bon Jovi, Steven Tyler and Tina Turner, just to name a few. In her story, you get a behind-the-scenes look at the music scene of the 1980s and some of the world’s biggest stars.
I loved reading about the songwriting process itself and often stopped to listen to the songs that Holly talks about. In fact, in the audio version of the book, which the author narrates, readers can also enjoy never-before-released snippets of the original demos to some of her biggest hits like “The Best” and “The Warrior.” All these songs are a testament to Holly’s incredible talent!
Writer Behind Songs Like “The Best” and “Love is a Battlefield”
As to why, of all her famous songs, Holly chose I Am the Warrior as the title of her book, she says that when she first wrote this song, she didn’t know that it would be a big hit, nor did she know that it would “serve as a kind of theme song for the rest of my life. It didn’t feel autobiographical when I wrote it, but as I’ve learned, sometimes we don’t write songs – the songs write us.”
If you grew up with any of these iconic songs, you will love this well-written real-life tale of the music scene in the 80s. As Holly reminds us, “Music has a way of transporting us, catapulting us into the future or taking us back to a time long past, back to what was happening the first time we heard someone sing something that profoundly changed our lives forever.” I Am the Warrior will certainly transport you as it did me!
About Holly Knight:
A vital force behind the sound of some of rock’s most powerful female artists, Holly Knight’s iconic musical imprint is woven into the very fabric of the MTV generation. Throughout the 1980s, singer/songwriter Holly Knight composed anthems that became the soundtrack for millions of people’s lives and also created and crafted empowering odes to independence, liberation, and equality. These universal themes have never been more relevant than they are today which is why we still hear her music every day. On television, films, and commercials, Knight’s work has become not just ubiquitous – but also generation-defining.
For all of the dozens of recognizable songs she has written, however, working with legends including Rod Stewart, Kiss, and Aerosmith, it was her collaborations with female artists that truly broke through, giving a new voice to women all over the world. Defiant, purposeful and ultimately triumphant, her work with Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, and the band Heart, among others, also helped pave the way for the next generation of defining female musical masters including Amy Winehouse, Adele and Lady Gaga. It was the music and words she wrote. But it was also the visual representations on MTV that helped define Holly’s work for the masses.
