The voice of Laura Branigan—rough, nearly comically impassioned—was very much the voice of mid-1980s pop music, emotional and over-emotional, grand but somehow hollow, very resistible or irresistible depending on your mood or character. Her album Self Control (1984) was everywhere in that time period, and so were the music videos that went with them. Many will still remember the “Oh-oh-oh/oh-oh-oh!” male chorus on the title track, the cryptic lyrics, and the peculiar erotic sacrifice imagery of the video, and her goth look on the cover of the album.
Branigan was born into a large Irish family in New York in 1952, and she came up the hard way, trying out bands, doing some back-up vocals for Leonard Cohen in the mid-1970s, and she managed to get signed to Atlantic Records by 1979, but they didn’t know what to do with her and her surging voice until the second single off her first album, “Gloria,” became an all-time hit.
The narrator of “Gloria” scathingly describes the heroine: “If everybody wants you/why isn’t anybody calling?” Branigan wonders. Maybe it’s time to “marry for the money…take a lover in the afternoon,” she advises. What is this narrator’s relationship to Gloria? Was she once a friend? Did Gloria do the Branigan narrator dirt? The musical backing is anthemic and very cheerful, which makes the mystery of it all the more invigorating. “Slow down, before you start to blow it,” Branigan counsels Gloria. “I think you’re headed for a breakdown…so be careful not to show it.”
It’s as if Branigan wants this eventual crash for this Gloria dame. “I think they’ve got your number!” she cries in the music video, a mischievous smile on her face. “I think they got the alias…that you’ve been living under!” Yet there’s maybe some sympathy there as well for all the voices in Gloria’s head, which Branigan sings as “all the voices in your head,” as if her narrator is becoming Gloria, or wants or wanted to be her. For a pop song of this moment, “Gloria” is tantalizingly complicated, yet it also became a dance hit at clubs.
Branigan’s voice is very much a rock voice, very rough, yet full and throbbing, too, which is what made her the queen of the 1980s power ballad, a guilty pleasure, and beautiful in the videos, very innocent and open and credulous-looking. Self Control was a hit everywhere, synth-pop to the maximum, and the lyrics for the title track are just as cryptic in their way as the lyrics to “Gloria.”
After some electric guitar, Branigan sings, “Oh the night/is my world…city lights/painted girls.” She lives among the creatures of the night, and she hasn’t got the will to try and fight, she’s living in the forest of the dream, and she knows the night is not as it would seem…and it’s all deliriously silly/suggestive. Branigan in the video seems to be getting stalked or hounded by the Phantom of the Opera, and then she enters what looks like an orgy/acting class, and the Phantom has his way with her, and this all seems like some kind of fantasy in her head.
There’s a lot of sex and sexual exploration on Self Control, and Branigan gives herself over to it with abandon: “Satisfaction…when you’re touching me…you start a chain reaction…deep inside of me!” she howls, and she is always at her best when you feel like she cannot possibly get any louder or more intense and then she somehow manages to go even further vocally. This is the voice of excess for an excessive time, and there is a chill to it, too, for this was a time when sex might kill you. “Can’t wait for you to put your…hands on me!” she emphasizes on “Take Me,” and the sound of this voice is the sound of something illicit, something that has to be secret.
“Ti Amo” is a classic Branigan track because she hits certain words harder and harder and harder still, relentlessly, until she transcends the corniness of all the ‘80s backing and her intensity is its own thing, shining and immaculate and worthy of respect. She loves to hit very high notes and then somehow go even higher and decorate that even higher note in a show-offy way; it was very immediate, yet she so often sang lyrics that were distanced or even in the third person, singing “she” instead of “I.”
It was not a career that lasted for long. Subsequent albums didn’t do as well, and by the 1990s Branigan was semi-retired, partly to take care of her ill husband, who died in 1996. By the early 2000s, she was making some tentative steps back to performing, playing Janis Joplin briefly in an Off-Broadway show, and then playing at CBGB in Manhattan in 2002. A fan since childhood, I went to see Branigan that night, and there were murmurs in the crowd that she sometimes canceled dates, and so we wondered if she would show.
After an introduction by the nightlife promoter Dean Johnson, Branigan eventually emerged on the modest stage, and she was the kind of performer who seemed to need a lot of reassurance from the crowd, which she got that night. If she wasn’t satisfied with some technical issue, she would stop singing until it was fixed; she kept asking for more “reverb.” Branigan knew how she wanted to sound, and CBGB was a small place, a place where punk acts played in the 1970s, not a place, really, for the ultimate 1980s power ballad singer. She did “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” which suited her sense of drama perfectly, and everything was right about that match of song and singer.
Sometimes it is enough, I think, to enjoy the splurging quality of a singing voice. I feel that way about Edith Piaf (Branigan called Piaf “my idol” when she appeared on The Tonight Show) and Kay Starr and Jackie Paris and other singers who love to fling their voices out at us. Laura Branigan was a voice of her time, and it was a cheesy time, a time that does not get or warrant any critical love. But I was happy to hear her ultra-intense voice having its fling on the radio when I was a kid, and I was happy to hear that voice in person at CBGB in 2002, so close that it was like a living thing or presence, and I was sad when I heard that Branigan died just two years later in 2004 at the age of 52.
Self control was not what we wanted from her when she sang, and just look at the happy faces at a bar when “Gloria” or “Self Control” come onto a jukebox; this isn’t just nostalgia, but the pleasure of listening to a sound that had no limits and was filled with a sense of possibility.