In 1980, Benny Mardones released a soaring ballad built around a haunting piano riff that would ultimately do something almost unheard of in pop music: become a hit twice in the same decade.
“Into the Night” climbed to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 during its original run, but Mardones never managed to follow it with another comparable hit. That earned him a permanent place in one-hit wonder history, and decades later, author Brent Mann ranked the song No. 3 in his book “99 Red Balloons and 100 Other All-Time Great One-Hit Wonders.”
The distinctive sound at the heart of “Into the Night” began while Mardones and co-writer Robert Tepper were in Miami working on songs for Mardones’ album Never Run, Never Hide.
In an interview with Professor of Rock before his death, Mardones recalled spending much of one night working on the song’s main riff. The following morning, an encounter with a teenage neighbor helped inspire the story that would become his signature hit.
But the song’s first trip up the charts turned out to be only half of its remarkable story.
Nearly nine years later, an Arizona radio station put the original “Into the Night” back into rotation following a “Where Are They Now?” feature about Mardones. Listeners responded, other stations followed and the song improbably returned to the Billboard Hot 100 in 1989.
This time, it reached No. 20.
The comeback gave the original recording two separate Top 20 runs on the Hot 100, first in 1980 and again in 1989, making it one of only 10 songs where the same artist’s version made it to the Top 20 twice. The song ultimately spent 37 nonconsecutive weeks on the chart across those two runs.
Professor of Rock highlighted just how unusual the song’s history was in his retrospective featuring Mardones. He called “Into the Night” a “Bottled Lightning Hall of Fame inductee” and noted that it charted three different times, including twice during the 1980s. He also described it as one of the most-played radio songs of all time.
Mann similarly marveled at the feat in “99 Red Balloons and 100 Other All-Time Great One-Hit Wonders,” writing that, outside of perennial holiday recordings such as Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” what Mardones accomplished by scoring twice with the same single was “virtually unheard of.”
Even more remarkably, Mardones wasn’t riding a thriving music career when his old hit suddenly returned. He was living in Paris without a record contract, according to Mann, and Never Run, Never Hide had gone out of print.
Mardones returned to the United States amid the renewed interest and recorded another version of “Into the Night.” But that wasn’t the recording listeners wanted. Radio DJs continued spinning the original.
Its longevity went far beyond that second chart run. Mann reported that ASCAP said “Into the Night” had received more than 4 million spins on the airwaves and ranked among the Top 25 songs in terms of all-time national radio airplay at the time his book was published.
Mann believed there was a reason the record refused to stay in 1980.
“‘Into the Night’ is one of those uncommon numbers that doesn’t seem to belong to any particular era or genre,” he wrote, arguing that the recording could have emerged in several different decades because its sound was so difficult to pin down.
The song has also generated controversy over the years because of its opening reference to a 16-year-old girl. Mardones maintained that listeners often misunderstood the story behind the lyrics.
He said the inspiration was a teenager named Heidi, whose family lived near Mardones and Tepper while the musicians were writing in Miami. After Heidi’s father left the family struggling financially, Mardones began paying the children to perform small jobs, including having Heidi walk his dog.
Mardones said the family’s circumstances helped inspire the song, which he viewed as a fantasy about rescuing them from their hardship rather than the story many listeners assumed from its opening line.
More than four decades later, “Into the Night” occupies an unusual place in one-hit wonder history. Mardones may have never found another song that could match it, but he didn’t exactly need one.
His one hit became a hit all over again.
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