White Heat is the twelfth studio album recorded by singer Dusty Springfield, and eleventh released. It was only released in the United States and Canada. More so than her previous two albums, It Begins Again (1978), and Living Without Your Love (1979), and the non-album single "It Goes Like It Goes" (1980), White Heat was a distinct departure from Springfield's Los Angeles-produced radio-friendly soft rock sound, being closely identified with the new wave, synthpop sounds of the early 1980s. The album arguably contains the most diverse selection of genres to be collected on any Dusty Springfield studio album, ranging from Robbie Buchanan's ballad "Time and Time Again", orchestrated by James Newton Howard, to the aggressive hard rock of "Blind Sheep", co-written by Springfield herself. The sessions for "Blind Sheep" are the last designated sessions for Twentieth Century Fox Records in the Musician's Guild Logs. The album's opening track and only single release was "Donnez-Moi (Give It to Me)" which production wise took more than a few hints from contemporaneous synthesizer-driven pop productions by Giorgio Moroder, like Donna Summer's The Wanderer and Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What a Feeling", and British New Romantic bands like the Human League and their 1981 album Dare. Background and recording Jean-Alain Roussel lived in Montreal at the time. Springfield lived part-time in Toronto at this stage in her life; the two met through mutual friends and ended up collaborating on most of White Heat. Written by Canadian New Wave band Rough Trade's Carole Pope and Kevan Staples, "Soft Core" describes the realities of a dysfunctional relationship. "Soft Core" was cut in a single take by sheer mistake, thanks to an engineer throwing a tape machine into 'record', with composer Kevan Staples playing a grand piano. The sound of footsteps heard at the beginning of the track is, in fact, Springfield walking up to the piano for what she thought was just a rehearsal. Release In the aftermath of the disco backlash and its ensuing dramatic drop in record sales worldwide, Springfield's American label United Artists Records was bought out. 20th Century Fox Records took on the project, but by the time that the album was completed and ready for release, 20th Century Fox had in turn been sold, bought by the US arm of the PolyGram conglomerate. The release date was postponed for another six months and when White Heat finally came out, it had been