Happy 25th Anniversary to Paula Abdul’s third studio album Head Over Heels, originally released June 13, 1995.
With her second studio album Spellbound (1991), Paula Abdul sought to make a statement: she wasn’t just another faceless MTV-era flash in the pan. Abdul assembled the bulk of the long player in association with The Family Stand—an enterprising funk trio signed to EastWest/Atlantic Records; additional collaborations with Prince, Jorge Corante, and Colin England could be heard on the project as well. The resulting record was a bold combination of floorfillers, plush downtempos, and a few social commentary set pieces; Abdul also co-wrote four of the eleven sides on Spellbound. Her arrival at this watershed moment was due to a culmination of events over a three-year expanse that saw Abdul transition from an in-demand choreographer to one of the hottest musical acts of the period.
Issued by Virgin Records in 1988, Abdul’s inaugural set Forever Your Girl wasn’t an overnight success. Its commercial momentum built itself steadily over six months until its third single “Straight Up” caused the LP to explode. By the top half of 1990, Abdul was in healthy competition with Madonna and Janet Jackson—the two leading ladies in popular music at that time. Barring the occasional overlap, Madonna resided on one side of the genre spectrum (pop) and Janet Jackson on the other end (R&B)—there wasn’t always a middle ground to be found.
With a cunning, club-friendly aesthetic inset with a seamless blend of pop and R&B, Abdul was able to situate herself at a central location on that same genre spectrum to court both white and black consumers. And this is to say nothing of Abdul’s Syrian-Jewish heritage which blurred the racial lines of how she was perceived. Virgin shrewdly used this to further woo program directors at black and white radio outlets to keep Abdul present on their playlist rotations.
But the former Laker girl who made good did have her fair share of naysayers that dismissed her as a vocal lightweight who obscured her purported lack of technical prowess with elaborate music videos and song productions. However, at the end of its promotional lifespan in August 1992, Spellbound had achieved commercial victory and positive critical notices—importantly, it evinced an uptick in Abdul’s creative agency to refute the harsh criticism she weathered with Forever Your Girl.
Her public triumph was soon undercut by private challenges though. A troubled marriage to actor Emilio Estevez and a catastrophic bout with bulimia nervosa sidelined Abdul. In the three years she was away, she divorced Estevez (in 1994) and conquered her eating disorder, all while earnestly kicking off the blueprinting process for her third album, Head Over Heels.
Describing the thrust behind the LP in an interview with BigO Magazine in June 1995, Abdul remarked, “The key was putting in a thread so that it all becomes cohesive, and that was the biggest challenge—and I’m very excited about it. I feel like I have made a very uplifting, fun, and more sophisticated album.”
Out of the record’s fourteen cuts—sixteen on the Japanese pressing—Abdul co-penned five. The writing-production principals enlisted for Head Over Heels boasted a few old friends and some new faces, including The Family Stand, Elliot Wolff, Oliver Leiber, Daryl Simmons, Rhett Lawrence, Tim Miner, Dallas Austin, Jon Lind, Bernadette Cooper (of Klymaxx), and Color Me Badd. The latter not only co-wrote the colorful Motown kitsch of “Ain’t Never Gonna Give You Up,” they also provided handsome back-up muscle behind Abdul on the song. The only other guest to feature on Head Over Heels in a support capacity was the late, great Ofra Haza via “My Love Is For Real,” though it is Abdul that carries the track and the album on the whole.
Tuneful pop melodies bound to (then) modish urban grooves remained Abdul’s sonic staplemark on the album, but as Spellbound had proven, the framework of this approach could be expanded upon—Head Over Heels was the next logical step forward.
Her interest in musicality is immediately established as her primary point of concern with “Crazy Cool,” the LP’s opener. The bottom-heavy funk number is accomplished in both its instrumental execution and Abdul’s steamy vocal delivery that emphasizes her continued growth as a singer. From “Crazy Cool” onward, Abdul easily navigates her uptempo tracks and her balladic selections throughout Head Over Heels to exhibit its diversity.
On its danceable entries, Abdul does not confine herself to one mode of operation on the long player—there is Latin swing (“Love Don’t Come Easy”), house (“Sexy Thoughts”), and hip-hop-soul (“The Choice Is Yours”). Each one celebrates rhythm and movement—distinct elements always accounted for in any of Abdul’s songs.
As for her ballad stock, Abdul had steadily increased the count of quieter compositions with each record; Forever Your Girl had one (“Next to You”), Spellbound had four (“Rush Rush,” “Blowing Kisses in the Wind,” “Will You Marry Me?,” “Goodnight My Love (Pleasant Dreams)”). There were no less than five—“If I Were Your Girl,” “I Never Knew It,” “Missing You,” “Cry for Me,” and “Highschool Crush”—housed on Head Over Heels. This downtempo quintet is as gorgeously arranged in warm adult contemporary tones, strings, and similar production ornamentation as the Spellbound foursome was.
With such an abundance of high-quality content here one might have trouble spotlighting a standalone piece—Head Over Heels has two in “My Love Is For Real” and “Ho-Down.” The former jam is a cinematic excursion into the realm of Eastern flavored pop and world music, whereas the latter track reworks an interpolation of Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra’s 1931 classic “Ain’t Got No Gal in This Town” into a saucy hip-hop kiss-off. Top to bottom, Head Over Heels had Abdul at the apex of her artistic power. It was unfortunate then that the record would not find the commercial audience it deserved.
Upon Head Over Heels’ release through the Captive subsidiary imprint of Virgin Records (as Spellbound was before it), music columnists weren’t overwhelmingly negative toward the project, but they stopped short of doling out praise for it. Incredulously, the critical consensus that Abdul was too “passé” for the mainstream marketplace became the narrative despite Head Over Heels being no less modern than anything she’d done beforehand.
While the reviews were (unfairly) middling, Abdul must have been more incensed with the indifference her label showed to Head Over Heels. Virgin did bankroll the album in its genesis cycle and up through the video treatments of its singles (“My Love Is For Real,” “Crazy Cool,” “Ain’t Never Gonna Give You Up”), but they were missing in action on the ground when it came time to court radio and retail.
Even with it earning a gold certification stateside, Head Over Heels shifted only three million copies globally and yielded one hit single in “My Love Is For Real”—a disappointing sales downturn for such a strong record.
Abdul and Virgin parted soon afterward and in the six-year slipstream after Head Over Heels, Abdul rebranded herself as a judge/television mentor on the music competition program American Idol. To her satisfaction, as Abdul’s profile rose through American Idol, her discography began aging gracefully, its influence evident in the works of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears.
But Abdul’s own aspirations to return to music did linger. Several attempts were made (and later abandoned) to resuscitate that part of her career. Specifically, in the late 1990s, Abdul began preliminary designs on a comeback affair and a subsequent anthem for it; that song was “Spinning Around,” co-written by Abdul with Ira Shickman, Kara DioGuardi, and Osborne Bingham. When the record failed to surface, the demo for “Spinning Around” languished until it was stumbled upon by an A&R representative from Parlophone Records and forwarded on to the Princess of Pop herself, Kylie Minogue; it became the launch pad for her seventh studio set, Light Years (2000).
When “Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow” was ushered forward in January of 2008, it was Abdul’s first formal single since “Ain’t Never Gonna Give You Up” hit the racks twelve years prior. It was included on her American Idol castmate (and respected musician) Randy Jackson’s showcase, Randy Jackson’s Music Club, Vol. 1 (2008). Modest sales and friendly reviews ensued for the single. And although Abdul has toured—to acclaim in both traditional and residency formats—as recently as 2019, a proper successor to Head Over Heels has yet to materialize.
If Head Over Heels is truly Abdul’s final studio act, it is an excellent curtain call.
Building on the progressive thrust of its precursor, Abdul’s third effort is even more creatively ambitious in its aim than Spellbound. Chart going crowds might have missed the opportunity to check out this raft of cool pop tunes in 1995, but its sonic vitality is more than ready for rediscovery today.
LISTEN: