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Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo: Tiny Desk Concert

"You know I wrote this for you, baby — you know that." "Oh, yeah, sure."

Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo do mock-bickering as well as any long-married couple – which, of course, is exactly what they are. More notably, they've formed a commercial and creative juggernaut spanning more than three decades, with the Brooklyn-born Benatar singing and Giraldo working as her guitarist, producer and fellow songwriter.

Benatar's recording career spans a dozen studio albums, seven of which have sold more than a million copies, and has yielded multiple Grammy Awards and some remarkably sturdy staples of the classic-rock canon. Though most widely associated with a string of chart-toppers in the late '70s through the '80s — "Love Is A Battlefield," "Heartbreaker," et al — Benatar and Giraldo still draw huge crowds, for reasons made abundantly clear here. Classically trained as a mezzo-soprano, Benatar still possesses a formidable instrument, and the pair's songs have lost none of their appeal in the intervening decades. And, of course, the duo performs with an agreeable mixture of lighthearted banter, chops and charm.

At the Tiny Desk, Benatar and Giraldo ran through three of their classic songs: 1979's "We Live For Love," 1984's "We Belong" and, after a long and satisfying windup, 1981's "Promises In The Dark."

Set List

  • "We Live For Love"
  • "We Belong"
  • "Promises In The Dark"
  • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Maggie Starbard, Kevin Wait; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Colin Marshall, Maggie Starbard; Assistant Producer: Susan Hale Thomas; photo by Susan Hale Thomas/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)