Bonnie Tyler says she'll never get tired of singing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' when there's an eclipse
- Bonnie Tyler says she'll never be sick of singing her 1983 hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
- "I still get excited when I hear the song on the radio," Tyler told Good Morning America.
It's been over 40 years since "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was released, but Bonnie Tyler says she still loves singing the song whenever there's an eclipse.
"I still get excited when I hear the song on the radio," Tyler told Good Morning America. "Every time the eclipse comes, everyone all over the world, they play 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' and I never get tired of singing it."
Searches for the song on Spotify increased by almost 50% in the US last week, in the lead up to Monday's total solar eclipse, a Spotify representative told CNN.
The Grammy-nominated song was written by the late composer Jim Steinman. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1983, the year it was released.
"When I first heard it, I thought, 'Oh my God, this song is amazing,'" Tyler told GMA.
"You know, I couldn't believe he was giving it to me," she said, referring to Steinman.
In 2002, Steinman told the American magazine Playbill that he originally intended the song to be about vampires.
"But with 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song," Steinman said.
In September 2023, the music video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" reached one billion views on YouTube. It was her first music video to reach the milestone, per Billboard.
This is not the first time the song has seen a surge in popularity around an eclipse.
The song saw a 500% increase in sales in the week leading up to the previous total solar eclipse in August 2017, Billboard reported.
That year, on the day of the eclipse, Tyler performed the track aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise alongside the band DNCE and its lead singer, Joe Jonas.
But eclipse or no eclipse, the song remains one of her most popular.
"Well, put it this way, I've been singing it in every show that I've done since I recorded it, and I've just finished nearly 40 shows in Europe," Tyler told the New York Post.
She added that she doesn't know how much she has earned in royalties from the song over the past four decades.
"To be honest, I don't deal with that side of it. My husband and the accountants, they do all that," Tyler said.
Representatives for Tyler and Spotify did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.