Jennifer Rush (born Heidi Stern; September 28, 1960) is an American pop and rock singer. She achieved success during the mid-1980s with several singles and studio albums including the million-selling single "The Power of Love", which she co-wrote and released in 1984. Her greatest success came in Europe, particularly Germany. Early life Rush was born Heidi Stern in the New York City borough of Queens and has two older brothers. Her father, Maurice Stern, is an operatic tenor, voice teacher, and sculptor. Her parents divorced, and she and her brothers lived with their mother only until Rush was a toddler, and then with their father and his second wife on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan. Rush studied violin at the Juilliard School and also took play lessons, although she did not enjoy these instruments and instead took to playing the guitar in private. When Rush was nine, the Stern family moved to Germany. They returned to the United States when she was a teenager. She also lived for a time in Seattle, Washington when her father was a professor of voice at the University of Washington. Career Rush's debut studio album, titled with her legal name of Heidi Stern, was released locally in Seattle, Washington in 1979. After meeting singer, songwriter, and producer Gene McDaniels in Seattle, she flew to LA to record demo songs with him. She credits McDaniels as being her first and most influential mentor as a songwriter and a singer. In 1982, following McDaniels's persistence, Rush moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, where her father was engaged as an opera singer. It was the co-written single "The Power of Love", the fifth and last single release from her debut studio album, that became the biggest selling single of 1985 in the United Kingdom, as well as becoming a significant hit in Australia, Ireland, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden, and was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records at the time as the best-selling single by a female solo artist in the history of the British music industry. "The Power of Love" held that status until 1992, when it was outsold by Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You". "The Power of Love" reached number one for several weeks in Australia, South Africa and numerous European countries. Though it reached number one or the top ten in