I am a huge fan of Jennifer Warnes. She is a singer’s singer with an innate ability to select first-rate repertoire, and the foremost interpreter of the songs of Leonard Cohen. She’s also the singer of today’s classic song of the day, “I Know a Heartache When I See One.”
Jennifer Warnes recorded “I Know a Heartache When I See One” for her fifth album, Shot Through the Heart. Arista Records released “I Know a Heartache When I See One” as a single in June of 1979 and it was a hit on multiple charts. The song went to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, #21 on the Cash Box Top 100, #14 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, and #10 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. That’s not bad.
“I Know a Heartache When I See One” was written by the team of Rory Bourke, Kerry Chater, and Charlie Black. Rory Bourke was a well-known country songwriter, penning songs for Charlie Rich (“The Most Beautiful Girl”), Elvis Presley (“Patch It Up”), Anne Murray (“A Little Good News”), K.T. Oslin (“Come Next Monday”), George Strait (“You Look So Good in Love”), and others. Kerry Chater was a member of Gary Puckett & the Union Gap who later became a successful songwriter, mainly (but not exclusively) in the country mold. Charlie Black was also a country songwriter and producer who was later inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association International Hall of Fame.
Jennifer Warnes had previously had a hit with 1976’s “Right Time of the Night.” She’d go on to have number-one hits with two movie theme songs: “Up Where We Belong” (a duet with Joe Cocker from An Officer and a Gentleman) and “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” (a duet with Bill Medley from Dirty Dancing). She also sang “It Goes Like It Goes” from Norma Rae and “One More Hour” from Ragtime, both nominated for Academy Awards for Best Original Song. (“It Goes Like It Goes” won her the Oscar.) Jennifer Warnes had a long but sporadic career, releasing a series of stellar albums that included Famous Blue Raincoat (an album of Leonard Cohen songs released in 1986), The Hunter (1992), and The Well (2001). Her last album (so far) was Another Time, Another Place, released in 2018. Not a lot of albums, but all of them choice.
