Back in October, on the eve of the new nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote a piece for Spin suggesting 10 acts that should be inducted that would get more women into the Hall. And when the nominations came out, 3 women were included, but one of them hadn't been suggested in my piece: Pat Benatar. She was in almost every draft of my list, but I think I got too caught up in a box-ticking mentality and felt like The Go-Go's occupied the same '80s pop/rock space while also covering the all-female band niche. But Benatar absolutely deserves to be in the Hall, and I hope she makes the cut when the induction list is unveiled this month -- she's the perfect example of someone who could have been a straight-up pop singer and instead dedicated most of her career to marrying her powerful voice to the volume and attitude of guitar-driven rock. In a way she's probably the most respected female rock star who was never in a well known band and isn't usually seen playing guitar (although she can play).

Pat Benatar deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Take It Any Way You Want It
2. The Victim
3. Hell Is For Children
4. No You Don't
5. Suburban King
6. Little Paradise
7. My Clone Sleeps Alone
8. I Want Out (live)
9. Big Life
10. Precious Time
11. In The Heat Of The Night
12. Prisoner Of Love
13. I'll Do It
14. Lipstick Lies
15. Evil Genius
16. So Sincere
17. Cool Zero
18. Silent Partner
19. Never Wanna Leave You
20. Love In The Ice Age

Tracks 4, 7, 11 and 16 from In The Heat Of The Night (1979)
Tracks 3, 6, 12 and 19 from Crimes Of Passion (1980)
Tracks 1, 10 and 15 from Precious Time (1981)
Tracks 2, 13 and 18 from Get Nervous (1982)
Tracks 8 and 14 from Live From Earth (1983)
Tracks 5 and 20 from Tropico (1984)
Track 9 from Seven The Hard Way (1985)
Track 17 from Wide Awake In Dreamland (1988)

I remember a few years ago, I was working some corporate gig where the entertainment at the end of the conference was Pat Benatar, and I was a little amused that the hosts were instructed to specifically give Benatar and her husband and longtime collaborator Neil Giraldo equal billing, and to refer to him as Neil "Spyder" Giraldo. But as a guitarist on all of Benatar's albums and the writer and producer of many of her hits, Giraldo certainly has earned the right to have his name on the marquee, and their equal billing on later tours was probably a shrewd move that helped him get a shot at the Hall of Fame -- if Benatar gets inducted this year, Giraldo will go in with her, which is a relatively rare occurrence for solo artists' unbilled sidemen. Listening to the Giraldo-written "Silent Partner," I wondered if maybe it functions as a song that aptly describes his role in his wife's career, whether intentionally or not.

Pat Benatar has 1-4 writing credits on most of her best known albums (except zero on Seven The Hard Way), including hits like "Treat Me Right" and "Fire And Ice," and deep cuts included here like "Hell Is For Children," "My Clone Sleeps Alone," "So Sincere," "Never Wanna Leave You," "Evil Genius," "I'll Do It," and "Love In The Ice Age." But her strength was always her operatic vocal range and her ability to make a song her own. And I was impressed that while her albums, especially the early ones, are dotted with covers of songs made famous by a wide range of other artists (John Mellencamp, Kate Bush, The Alan Parsons Project, The Beatles, The Four Tops), but they all sound like Pat Benatar songs once she and her band got ahold of them. One of the few covers that wasn't a hit for Benatar or anyone else was The Sweet's "No You Don't," a deep cut from the same album that birthed "Ballroom Blitz," where she hams it up and sings in a British accent like the original (although that doesn't explain the British accent on "My Clone Sleeps Alone," a genuinely strange little song).

"Hell Is For Children," a song Benatar wrote after reading newspaper reports about child abuse, is by far her most famous song that was never released as a single, the only non-hit that appears in her Spotify top 10 and most of her best-of compilations and live albums. It's slower and heavier than her other hard rock songs, and has become something of a metal standard, covered by Viking, Children Of Bodom, and Halestorm, and featured in episodes of "The Simpsons" and "Mindhunter." It was also the then-recent song that led off a collection of older hits for the 1981 animated film American Pop's soundtrack album.

Arguably Benatar's biggest hit, "Love Is A Battlefield," was one of two new studio tracks on her first live album Live On Earth, so I included the other one, "Lipstick Lies," as well as one of the only non-singles among the live tracks, "I Want Out," which originally appeared on Get Nervous. But while "Battlefield" and the next album Tropico's big hit "We Belong" are classics, I think they signaled Benatar's slide toward a glossier, less rocking sound that makes her later albums less exciting, and after Tropico was her 6th straight million-seller, the platinum plaques started to dry up. Hell of a run on those first 6 albums, though. I went as far as Benatar's last '80s album, Wide Awake In Dreamland, which also contained her last Hot 100 hit, but since then she's released 4 albums, including a couple early '90s major label albums that had minor rock radio hits (weirdly, her last major label album was named after Gravity's Rainbow).

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