The oral history of 'Sweet Freedom'
How Rod Temperton and Michael McDonald joined forces to make a hit while soundtracking one of the great movie montages of the 1980s
Michael McDonald could feel sweet freedom shining its light on him.
It was 1983. The impossibly smooth-voiced singer-songwriter, then in his early 30s, was right where he wanted to be: In the confines of a Los Angeles recording studio, working with the super-producer Quincy Jones and the English funk-pop maestro Rod Temperton—twin behind-the-scenes powers of Michael Jackson’s recent world-beating album, Thriller.
McDonald and the R&B singer James Ingram had cowritten “Yah Mo B There” for Ingram’s debut solo album, It’s Your Night. Everyone believed the song would be a hot single—but the track still needed some indefinable something to push it beyond the stratosphere. Enter Temperton, who would provide his Midas touch.
“Rod was on that session mostly as a writer,” McDonald recalls in the 2017 Temperton biography The Invisible Man. “Once he had felt that the song needed a little bit more of a bridge, he came up with that in a day in the studio, kind of boning up the song into something a little more exciting. That was my first meeting with Rod, and the first time seeing him do what he did. I was already a big fan of his, especially of all the Heatwave stuff and then, of course, the songs he did with Michael Jackson on Off the Wall. It was just exciting to get a chance to work with him, you know, and he brought a lot to the table on that song, making it a better song.”
“Yah Mo B There” proved to be a top-20 hit. A couple years later, after collaborating with Quincy Jones on the score to The Color Purple, Temperton rang McDonald. Temperton had been putting in overtime, writing or cowriting six of the nine songs for the soundtrack to director Peter Hyams’s buddy-cop film Running Scared, starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines. He needed a singer for “Sweet Freedom,” a song he had written to accompany one of the most purely entertaining movie montages of the 1980s.
Leaving behind frigid Chicago and their daily brushes with death as undercover detectives, Danny Costanzo (Crystal) and Ray Hughes (Hines) holiday in edenic Key West. They zoom around on mopeds, drunkenly fish for big game, roller-skate while wearing obscene T-shirts, mack on ladies in high-cut bikinis. Amid all the bromantic wilding out, they begin considering taking early retirement to open a bar on the island.
For this sequence, Temperton delivered a pitch-perfect ray of mid-’80s sunshine with “Sweet Freedom.” Atop a bed of Roland drum machines, brass blasts, and jaunty synthesized marimba, McDonald sings lyrics that somehow merge the themes of a traditional spiritual with Reagan-era self-esteem movement platitudes:
Reachin’ out to meet the changes
Touchin’ every shining star
The light of tomorrow is right where we are
There’s no turnin’ back
From what I’m feeling
“Sweet Freedom” was a contender for song of the summer 1986. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on June 14, peaking at number 7 on August 301—one of the three top-15 hits that the Running Scared soundtrack ultimately produced. “Sweet Freedom” would also be McDonald’s final single to crack the Top 40, signaling the end of the halcyon days of what is now known as yacht rock.
Without further ado, here is the oral history of “Sweet Freedom,” which brings together archival remembrances from McDonald, the late Temperton (who died in 2016 from cancer), among others, with new interviews I recently conducted with Hyams and video director Leslie Libman.
