I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties

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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. Her name became recognizable to me when I read song credits and noticed how many of these great songs were by her. She wrote “Love Is a Battlefield” for Pat Benatar, “The Warrior” for Scandal featuring Patty Smyth and several Tina Turner classics, from "Better Be Good to Me" to "The Best. As someone who’s worked her entire life in the music business I appreciate her candor and the way she let nothing and no one stand in her way. This is the story of a young girl with a dream and the story of the music scene of an iconic decade.

I Am the Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing the Hits and Ro…

Writing songs for Turner “always came from a place of strength and being fierce and just true to oneself. It was offered in a hardcover edition by Permuted Press, a Kindle edition, and an Audible audio book, which she narrated.

Travel back to the 1980s, back to the big hair, even bigger shoulder pads and the great music of that era with I AM THE WARRIOR: MY CRAZY LIFE WRITING THE HITS AND ROCKING THE MTV EIGHTIES by Holly Knight. 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.

I Am the Warrior | Book by Holly Knight | Official Publisher

Even if you were too young to remember or not even born yet, music from this decade continues to resonate today. Tina Turner has recorded nine of her tunes, including "The Best", "Better Be Good to Me", and " In Your Wildest Dreams" (1996). She was a member of the 1980s pop rock groups Spider and Device, and wrote or co-wrote several hit singles for other artists, such as " Rag Doll", " Obsession", " Love Is a Battlefield", " The Best", " Invincible", " Better Be Good to Me", " The Warrior", and " Change".Backstage, onstage, in the studio, and on the road, this memoir is an impressively revealing life story by an articulate woman who welcomes her readers to take a look back at one of the most adventurous and colorful periods in music history. I Am the Warrior is a story of survival, perseverance, and triumph laced with ample amounts of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was an interesting and groundbreaking time for women in music, and Knight broke a lot of barriers for women. I took off one star because I became really invested in her life but she didn't really talk about her 3 marriages or 2 kids until one brief mention at the end.

Holly Knight on songwriting for Tina Turner, Pat Benatar Holly Knight on songwriting for Tina Turner, Pat Benatar

In her memoir, Knight's writing focuses on just those aspects of her career -- excesses, hits, and starfucking. Starting in the late 1970s in post-punk New York, Knight, a gifted keyboardist, joined the band Spider--which quickly ascended to buzzworthy status before things began to disintegrate. Holly joined a list of other trailblazing women by contributing her story to the 2017 book Because I Was a Girl: True Stories for Girls of All Ages, published by Henry Holt and Company. and I loved how she included never before released demo tracks of her biggest songs that she discusses at the end of chapters!I've been a lifelong fan of the music written by Holly Knight so I was extremely excited about reading her long awaited memoir! And here I am on the road with Tina Turner and she's teasing my hair because I told her I liked her hair.