Go-Go’s singer and solo artist Belinda Carlisle has introduced plans to launch her first pop album since 1996’s A Woman & A Man. The “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” singer has technically launched two albums since — the 2007 French-language Voila and a Sikh chant album Wilder Shores in 2017. According to Retro Pop Magazine, Carlisle has a sequence of recent initiatives coming in 2023 and 2024, the primary being an EP due within the spring and a lead single, “Big Big Love,” out in February.
“It’s so weird, because I was going to retire. Just work occasionally and live a nice life. Then my son ran into [songwriter] Diane Warren at Starbucks and she goes, ‘What is your mom doing?’ He says, ‘I don’t know,’ and she goes, ‘Oh, then let’s call her!’. She has the foulest language in the business and she goes, ‘Bitch, what are you doing? I have some hits for you,’” Carlisle informed the journal.
“I was like, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ Because it’s a big commitment when you do something like that. But I went to the studio and I don’t even know what to say – it was so good. There are about three singles on the EP and they’re incredible.”
Carlisle will reportedly hit the studio with author/producer Gabe Lopez within the spring, after she wraps up her upcoming Decades Tour. “The working title is Once Upon A Time in California, because that’s really where it all began for me,” she says. “Everything’s done, all the artwork – I just have to finish the songs. After I made Wilder Shores, people were complaining like, ‘Why don’t you do something in English?’ And I said, ‘Well, whatever I do has to really mean something.’”
Carlisle provides: “After I got sober, ‘Voila’ was the first time I was able to work from the heart and just love what I was doing. I have to really love it; I can’t just put out an English-language pop album for the sake of it. So that’s why this is a surprise. I didn’t really expect to get excited about the classic pop songs until I was given the most amazing songs from Diane.”
Carlisle can be at present mapping out an all-star tribute with Dolly Parton, Debbie Harry, Gloria Estefan, and Cyndi Lauper, showing on the soundtrack to the forthcoming 80s For Brady movie starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, which hits theaters in February.