The success of the 1980s classic Top Gun , starring Tom Cruise as the pilot, was due in no small part to its soundtrack. This month the successor Top Gun: Maverick will be released and this time Lady Gaga will provide the music. Can she score as big a hit with her Hold My Hand as Berlin did with Take My Breath Away ?
Top Gun: Maverick is the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 film, in which Cruise once again takes on the role of pilot Maverick. Last year there were already rumors that Lady Gaga is involved in the film, which was postponed several times due to the corona pandemic.
Last week, the American pop star confirmed the news herself. She announced the single Hold My Hand , which was released on Tuesday. Lady Gaga said she spent several years working on the song to perfect it. She described it as “a love letter to the world during and after a difficult time”.
The singer was approached by the team behind the film to write a song for it. She thanked Cruise and composer Hans Zimmer, among others, for the opportunity and the great collaboration.
Hold My Hand , which Lady Gaga made together with producers BloodPop and Ben Rice, is a dramatic ballad in which the singer shows a lot of vocal riffs. The comparison to Berlin’s Take My Breath Away , the 1986 film’s soundtrack song that became a major hit, is easily made.
Producer and artist Giorgio Moroder, known for his work with singer Donna Summer, was asked by Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer in the eighties to write a song for the film.
That became Danger Zone , performed by Kenny Loggins. Bruckheimer was so pleased with the result that he asked Moroder to write something else for the film, but this time a quieter song for a romantic scene in the film. This became Take My Breath Away .
Moroder wrote the music and gave the composition to Tom Whitlock, a songwriter he had come to know as a car repairman when Whitlock was working on his Ferrari. Whitlock wrote the lyrics to Take My Breath Away and a demo was handed over to the makers of the film.
Director Tony Scott and the producers were so enthusiastic that they even decided to shoot extra romantic footage of Cruise and his co-star Kelly McGillis to play the music under. Moroder eventually chose the band Berlin with singer Terri Nunn, whom he had previously worked with, to record the song.
Take My Breath Away became a classic
The song was released as the second single from the Top Gun soundtrack after Danger Zone and reached number one on the charts in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Take My Breath Away was awarded both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best soundtrack song.
The song became a classic with 241 million views on YouTube and more than 370 million streams on Spotify with different versions. The soundtrack album, which contains several compositions by Moroder in addition to the two singles, became one of the best-selling film albums of all time.
If she follows in the footsteps of her predecessor with Hold My Hand , it will be Lady Gaga’s first hit since the 2020 release of Rain On Me with Ariana Grande. Should Lady Gaga also qualify for an Oscar, it would be her third nomination in the soundtrack category. The singer was nominated in 2016 with the song Till It Happens To You from the documentary The Hunting Ground . In 2019 she won the Oscar for the song Shallow from the movie A Star Is Born .