Songs Lyrics and YT- Youtube Music Videos

Pat Benatar - Hell Is For Children

Pat Benatar - Hell Is For Children Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Crimes Of Passion
Released: 1980

Hell Is For Children Lyrics

They cry in the dark
So you can't see their tears
They hide in the light
So you can't see their fears
Forgive and forget
All the while
Love and pain become one and the same
In the eyes of a wounded child

Because hell, Hell Is For Children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell, hell is for children
And you shouldn't have to pay for your love
With your bones and your flesh

It's all so confusing this brutal abusing
They blacken your eyes and then apologize
"Be daddy's good girl, and don't tell mommy a thing"
"Be a good little boy, and you'll get a new toy
Tell grandma you fell from the swing"

Because hell, hell is for children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell, hell is for children
And you shouldn't have to pay for your love
With your bones and your flesh

[Repeat: x3]
Hell, hell is for hell
Hell is for hell
Hell is for children

Hell is for children
Hell is for children

Writer/s: NEIL GERALDO, PAT BENATAR, ROGER CAPPS
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Hell Is For Children

Benatar wrote this song with her guitarist (and future husband) Neil Giraldo, and her bass player Roger Capps. The song is about child abuse. When we spoke with Giraldo, he explained: "That song was inspired by an article that Patricia read in the New York Times about child abuse. That started the lyric off, and the lyric went from her to Roger. Roger added a few lines to that. And then some form of the melody started being constructed. I got a hold of it and I finished writing the melody and I worked on the chorus, and I did the outro section to build it up, because I wanted the whole song to be very sad as the beginning. I wanted to make it intense so you could really feel the pain of what the song was about. So by the time it ended, you've got to be exhausted. And that was the point. 'Hell is for hell,' like a very powerful moment." (Here's our full interview with Neil Giraldo .)

In an interview with Portfolio Weekly, Benatar explained: "I was living in New York when we wrote it and the New York Times did a series of articles about child abuse in America. I came from a really small town on Long Island and I had no idea that this existed, not in the little gingerbread place I came from. I was stunned. It affected me so much. I was moved by the articles. Whenever that would happen I would write. I said to Neil, 'I want you to do something to the music that it sounds like pain. I want the intense pain that's happening to these children in the notes,' and so he did and it turned out just great. It became an anthem. I always wonder if other people have lofty intentions. I didn't.

We started a foundation for abused children. Then we had all these grownups writing letters saying no one had addressed this in this way before and that it was so great having someone in rock-n-roll doing this. It turned into this other thing that I don't think any of us foresaw. The anguish is there. Every time I sing it I really remember the afternoon when we talked about it."

Many listeners thought Benatar was singing about her own experience with child abuse, but that was far from true. Neil Giraldo told us: "Everybody thought that it was real. They thought that Patricia was abused as a child, which wasn't the case. She had a great upbringing. You couldn't get more Happy Days-like than her. She had the perfect Happy Days life. There was other abuse happening in my family, but it was a different type of thing, more verbal, but not physical like the song depicts.

I'm glad it turned out the way it did. It's one of my favorite songs that we wrote, and it really has a very powerful effect on people. And it's great to play, it's great to sing, great to hear, great to feel."

On the Crimes Of Passion album, this follows "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," a song whose writer, Eddie Schwartz, told us is about empowerment, not masochism or abuse.

Pat Benatar - Little Too Late

Pat Benatar - Little Too Late Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Get Nervous
Released: 1982

Little Too Late Lyrics

I hear you had a good offer down on Third Avenue
You tell me that was the reason
For whatcha' put me through, yeah
And now you come collapsin' back
I feel the heat of your attack
Want me to take you back
I'm givin' you the sack
So don't waste your time

[Chorus:]
It's a little too little
It's a Little Too Late
I'm a little too hurt
And there's nothin' left that I've gotta say
You can cry to me baby
But there's only so much I can take
Ah, it's a little too little
It's a little too late

You say you had a good time
But did ya' think it was for free - yeah
And how much did it get ya', all their flattery
And now you come back, runnin' for protection
You've been bitten by love and stung by rejection
You can't connect
What did you expect?
I'm still gettin' over you

[Chorus x4]

Writer/s: CALL, ALEXANDER HUGHES
Publisher: Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Little Too Late

This was written by Alex Call, a songwriter and musician who was lead singer in the group Clover (Huey Lewis was also in the group). Says Call, "I wrote that around the same time I wrote '(867-5309).' I was really angry at a guy who had been playing lead guitar with me who had split to go play with somebody else, so that's what the song is about. It wasn't actually a boy-girl thing, it was more like a bandleader-lead guitarist thing - 'You want to come back and play with me, I don't think so, Bud.'"

Call: "From a production standpoint, it was kind of funny. There used to be these vinyl LPs called Drum Drops. Drum Drops were just drum tracks recorded by some drummer in a studio. They're like 3 1/2 minute long things. There'd be a fill every 8 bars and a little something every 4 bars. I was going through and went, 'Oh, I kind of like this,' and started playing around. We had the very first drum machines, which were these little cocktail things, they looked like a little suitcase. They had 'Rock 1,' 'Rock 2,' 'Conga,' 'Jazz' and 'Waltz.' One output, a mono output. I used that a lot, I ran it through a little spring reverb, but we're talking about the early days of multitrack home recording. I had a big 15 inch reel 4-track as my recording thing. The way you multitrack on that, you have to flip these sync switches, so when you actually overdub, you're hearing it off the first head, so it was really murky-sounding, like you're playing underwater. When you get done recording, you flip the sync switches back and all of the sudden it sounds great, it sounds clear again. What you do then is, you record 3 tracks of stuff and pong it down to one. Then you record 2 tracks, and pong it down to another 2, so by continuing to pong tracks around, you could record 16 or 24 tracks of stuff, but with each generation, the sound got smaller and smaller. That's how it was done back then, the spring reverbs, the old cocktail drum machines. The drum drops were much better than the drum machines. I only used them on that one song, for everything else, I used 'Rock 1' on my old drum machine."

Like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," this became one of Benatar's most recognizable songs, and is often considered a female-empowerment anthem. Both songs, however, were written by men under interesting circumstances. Says Call, "Somebody said, it's not necessarily the truth, it's somebody's truth. For a song to connect, it has to have some reality to it, but it may be the reality's slightly skewed from what people think." (Check out our interview with Alex Call.)

Benatar said of this song: "That was Alex Call. I just liked the song. Some outside songs we rip to pieces. That song is not far from what he originally wrote."

Pat Benatar - Promises in the Dark

Pat Benatar - Promises in the Dark Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Precious Time
Released: 1981

Promises in the Dark Lyrics

Never again, isn't that what you said?
You've been through this before
An' you swore this time you'd think with your head
No one, would ever have you again
And if taking was gonna get done
You'd decide where and when
Just when you think you got it down
Your heart securely tied and bound
They whisper, Promises in the Dark

Armed and ready, you fought love battles in the night
But too many opponents made you weary of the fight
Blinded by passion, you foolishly let someone in
All the warnings went off in your head
Still you had to give in

Just when you think you got it down
Resistance nowhere to be found
They whisper, promises in the dark

But promises, you know what they're for
It sounds so convincing, but you heard it before
Cause talk is cheap and you gotta be sure
And so you put up your guard
And you try to be hard
But your heart says try again

You desperately search for a way to conquer the fear
No line of attack has been planned to fight back the tears
Where brave and restless dreams are both won and lost
On the edge is where it seems it's well worth the cost
Just when you think you got it down
Your heart in pieces on the ground
They whisper, promises in the... Dark

Writer/s: PAT BENATAR, PAT GERALDO
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Promises in the Dark Song Chart

Benatar wrote this song with her guitarist and future husband Neil Giraldo. The song deals with trials and tribulations of past relationships and how they affect the one you're in now. Haven't we all had to tend the emotional scars left behind from whoever got there first? In the case of Giraldo and Benatar, things worked out quite well: they got married in a cow pasture in Maui in 1982, and have been married ever since. They've also continued their musical partnership as well, with Giraldo producing all of Benatar's next albums.

Giraldo and Benatar were dating when they wrote this song, which was early in their musical partnership. In our interview with Neil Giraldo , he explained: "That was a song that Patricia started first. I mean, I start probably 93% of them, and she'll jump in after I get it started. But she actually started writing that on an airplane. And then she put some words together, and she said, 'Here, try to do something with this thing.'

Actually she slipped the words under the door of our music room in this little house we had. We wrote that I think in 1980. Even though we could have put it on Crimes of Passion, we ended up putting it on Precious Time instead. But she put the words under the door because she was too embarrassed to let me see the words face to face.

Then she had a little bit of an idea of a melody, so I took a little bit of what that was, and I wrote it on piano in our little music room. My favorite guitar I had in the room at the time fell and busted while I was writing, and busted the top of the neck off it. So that was like a curse. And then when we went to record it, we had everything but the last verse, and then I just wrote the words for the last verse in the studio while we were recording it. So that's how that one goes."

Precious Time cracked the #1 spot on the US albums chart for a week, and helped establish Benatar as an '80s icon. A former bank clerk and singing waitress, she was a classically trained singer who could rock the spandex and big jewelry, making her an MTV favorite as well as a mainstay on Pop radio.

Hinting at the personal nature of this song, Benatar told Songwriter Connection magazine in 1984: "Sometimes I really hate singing in the first person - it's so personal sometimes... I do mostly observational lyric but if it's directly from something that happened, I can't stand to sing it in first person. I'd rather sing it as we or they or you, or something else."

Neil Giraldo tells us that he knew early on that this song had hit potential. He explained: "I thought it was deep in a really good way. I think that it was a commercial hit, but I love the expression of the melody. It gave a lot of room for the vocal to be powerful. And then when we rehearsed the song, that's where I came up with that little guitar riff, which is the signature to that break between the slow part and the fast part. When I hit that in rehearsal and I put the song way up tempo - because the song was a ballad - I found I hit that, then I knew, I went, 'Oh, we got something now. This is going to work.' I knew it right then we had it."