Extra - Whitney Houston - "All At Once"

This really isn't news now, but Whitney Houston passed away last weekend. As one of the biggest acts of the 1980s, she scored seven #1 pop singles (consecutively) and a pair of #1 LPs before the decade was over. She also scored three #1 R&B hits, seven #1 adult contemporary singles and three #1 dance hits on the Billboard charts.
Just like what happened when Michael Jackson died, the news tilted pretty heavily towards the negative aspects of her life. Here at 80s Music Mayhem, we prefer to simply focus on the music and let an artist's body of work speak to their life. Whitney leaves behind a family who misses her dearly, and fans who debate her place in music history. She was already featured in this blog last summer, in a post that spotlighted her debut single, a duet with Teddy Pendergrass that is much more poignant now that both of them have left us far too soon.

While Whitney was running her string of seven straight #1 singles, today's featured song showed up on MOR-leaning and R&B radio stations during the Summer of 1986 but was never officially released as a single and didn't make the Billboard chart as a result. I never understood why, as "All At Once" is probably one of her best performances on an album that features many of them. It was written by Jeffrey Osbourne, with producer Michael Masser handling the arrangement; however, Whitney takes the words and makes them her own. And now that her voice has been silenced, the performance has taken on an entirely different (and bittersweet) meaning.

For more on Whitney's career that doesn't focus on the negative aspects, check out JB's post from The Hits Keep On Coming or this post from Any Major Dude With Half a Heart that has a number of tunes by other artists that were later performed by Whitney (reverse "covers," if you will).