Laura Branigan

There was a voice, in the eighties, capable of standing beside the greatest of its era without asking permission. Enormous, dramatic, with a power that made stadiums shake before Celine Dion existed in the mass imagination. It was the voice of Laura Branigan, and her story has two things that almost nobody puts together: that her two greatest anthems were, at bottom, other people's songs that she made hers forever, and that one of them came back from the dead, fifteen years after she was gone, to carry an entire city to its first championship.

The great translator

"Gloria", the song that made her a global name in 1982, was not originally hers: it was an Italian song by Umberto Tozzi. And "Self Control", her other pillar, from 1984, wasn't either: it belonged to another Italian, Raf. Both her pillars came from European pop melodrama, and she took them and gave them something the originals didn't have: an American voice, gigantic, that turned the continental ballad into a gale. "Gloria" reached number two in the United States; "Self Control" number four.

That is no demerit, it is a barely recognised art. There are singers who write and there are singers who transform, who take a melody and make it definitive with their throat. Elvis hardly ever wrote; neither did Sinatra. Branigan belonged to that lineage: the pure interpreters, the ones who make a song stop belonging to whoever composed it in order to belong to whoever sang it. Today "Gloria" is hers. Nobody remembers Tozzi's version. That is her signature.

The ending that came without warning

Her story is cut short far too early, and it has to be told carefully. Laura Branigan died on 26 August 2004, in her sleep, at her home in New York. She was fifty-two. The cause was a brain aneurysm that nobody had diagnosed. She had had headaches for weeks, and had not gone to a doctor.

She went quietly, all at once, with her voice still intact. There was no long illness and no farewell. One of the most powerful voices of her generation went out one night, asleep, at an age when she still had an enormous amount left to sing. It is one of those absences that hurt for what never got to happen.

The return, fifteen years later

And here is what makes her story different from that of so many voices that fade and are forgotten. In the 2018-2019 season, the St. Louis Blues, a hockey team that had never in its history won the championship, started playing "Gloria" in the locker room after every win. It became their lucky charm, their battle cry. The song of a woman who had been dead for almost fifteen years, blasting at full volume in a locker room full of players who hadn't even been born when she recorded it.

They won. For the first time in the franchise's history, the Blues lifted the Stanley Cup, in 2019, with "Gloria" as the soundtrack of the campaign. An entire city sang, for months, in the voice of Laura Branigan. She wasn't there to see it. But her voice was, as alive as the day she recorded it, pushing a team towards what it had never achieved. Great voices don't die entirely: they wait for the moment when they will be needed again.

What to remember

Laura Branigan had one of the most powerful voices of the eighties and used it to make unforgettable two songs somebody else had written, to the point that today they are hers and nobody else's. She went far too soon, in her sleep, with everything still ahead of her. And fifteen years later, the song that defined her was resurrected to carry a city to its first championship.

Remember it this way: there are interpreters who need never have written a note to become eternal, because what is theirs is the voice, and the voice does not expire. Branigan's came back from the dead to win a cup. Few signatures are greater than that.

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Sources

Laura Branigan, American singer born on 3 July 1952 in Mount Kisco, New York, and died on 26 August 2004 in East Quogue, New York, at the age of fifty-two, of an undiagnosed brain aneurysm; she had suffered headaches for weeks without seeking medical attention. "Gloria" (1982), an English adaptation of the song by the Italian Umberto Tozzi, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned her a nomination for the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance in 1982. "Self Control" (1984), a version of a song by the Italian Raf, reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. In the 2018-2019 NHL season, the St. Louis Blues adopted her recording of "Gloria" as a celebration anthem during the campaign in which they won the first Stanley Cup in their history, in June 2019. Celine Dion, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra have their own profiles in this series. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Songfacts, Smooth Radio, AnOther, Cover Me and other coverage.