Maneater

Maneater sounds like a stroke of luck no one saw coming: a song that starts softly, with a bassline that slithers and a keyboard weaving circles around the melody, until it suddenly explodes into a chorus that won’t let go. The song doesn’t ask permission to stay in your head; it plants itself there with Daryl Hall’s voice that seems to whisper and roar at the same time, while the rhythm sways between 80s soul and a groove reminiscent of Motown’s greatest hits. The most curious part is that, beneath its surface of a catchy tune, the lyrics play with the idea of a woman who devours men—but in reality, as the songwriters themselves admitted, it’s about something else: the voracity of a city like New York in the 80s, where money and power corrupted even the most basic things.

The song was born from a draft John Oates had sketched years earlier, almost as a reggae experiment that never quite took off. Hall suggested changing the rhythm to something more forceful, inspired by classic soul, and that’s how the instantly recognizable pattern was born. They recorded it in Philadelphia, with Neil Kernon and Hugh Padgham at the helm of production, and though they initially doubted that abrupt ending Hall had imagined ("She’s a maneater, and... stop!"), it ended up being the detail that changed everything. The track was released in 1982 as part of H2O, but it wasn’t until Nelly Furtado’s 2006 version—this time sampling The Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again—that it became a global phenomenon, reaching number 1 on the UK Singles Chart in June of that year.