"Tears Are Not Enough" is a 1985 charity single recorded by a supergroup of

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

artists, under the name Northern Lights, to raise funds for relief of the 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia. It was one of a number of such supergroup singles recorded between December 1984 and April 1985, along with Band Aid's " Do They Know It's Christmas?" in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

USA for Africa United Support of Artists for Africa (USA for Africa) was the name under which 47 predominantly U.S. artists, led by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, recorded the hit single "We Are the World" in 1985. The song was a U.S. and UK number one for ...

's "

We Are the World "We Are the World" is a charity single originally recorded by the supergroup USA for Africa in 1985. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian for the album '' We Are the World''. Wi ...

" in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

, "

Cantaré, cantarás "Cantaré, cantarás" ''(I Will Sing, You Will Sing)'' is a single by various Latin American icons called circumstantially "Hermanos", and it was released in 1985. The B-side is conformed by Herb Alpert's "African Flame". The song was considered ...

" by a supergroup of Latin American and Spanish singers, Chanteurs sans Frontières's "

Éthiopie "Éthiopie" is a charity song recorded in 1985 by the collective band known under the name 'Chanteurs sans Frontières'. The song achieved a huge success in France, topping the chart for two months and becoming one of the best-selling singles in ...

" in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

, and Fondation Québec-Afrique's "

Les Yeux de la faim "Les Yeux de la faim" (meaning "The Eyes of Hunger") is a French-language song written by Canadian journalist Gil Courtemanche and Canadian composer Jean Robitaille. It was recorded by a one-off supergroup of many musicians to raise funds for the ...

" in

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...

. Although recorded independently of the USA for Africa project, it was included on the full-length ''

'' album. The project was organized by Bruce Allen, who brought together a large group of artists to record a song written by

David Foster David Walter Foster (born November 1, 1949) is a Canadian musician, composer, arranger, record producer and music executive who chaired Verve Records from 2012 to 2016. He has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. His music career spans mor ...

Jim Vallance James Douglas Vallance (born May 31, 1952) is a Canadian songwriter, arranger and producer. He is best known as the songwriting partner of Canadian musician Bryan Adams. Vallance began his professional career as the original drummer and main song ...

Bryan Adams Bryan Guy Adams (born 5 November 1959) is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, composer, and photographer. He has been cited as one of the best-selling music artists of all time, and is estimated to have sold between 75 million and mor ...

Rachel Paiement Rachel Claire Paiement (born 1955) is a Canadian musician and songwriter. She is best known as a former member, singer and songwriter for the Franco-Ontarian band CANO in the 1970s.Paul Hyde Paul Reginald Nelson (born 21 May 1955), known by the stage name Paul Hyde, is a British-born Canadian singer-songwriter. He co-founded the rock band Payola$ with Bob Rock, serving as the band's main lyricist and vocalist. He later performed and ...

and

Bob Rock Robert Jens Rock (born April 19, 1954) is a Canadian record producer, sound engineer and musician, best known for producing rock bands and music artists such as Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, The Tragically Hip, the Cult, 31 ...

. Foster and Vallance wrote the music and initial lyrics, Adams completed the English lyrics, Paiement wrote the one French verse, Rock & Hyde contributed the song title. The song was recorded on February 10, 1985 at Manta Sound studios in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

. The song was issued as the album's second and final single by

Columbia Records Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music, Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese Conglomerate (company), conglomerate Sony. It was founded on Janua ...

on May 1, 1985, and quickly reached number one on the Canadian

Top 40 In the music industry, the Top 40 is the current, 40 most-popular songs in a particular genre. It is the best-selling or most frequently broadcast popular music. Record charts have traditionally consisted of a total of 40 songs. "Top 40" or " con ...

chart. It also finished number one on the year-end Canadian charts for that year. The song's video also received extensive airplay on

MuchMusic Much (an abbreviation for its full name MuchMusic) is a Canadian English language specialty channel owned by BCE Inc. through its Bell Media subsidiary that airs programming aimed at teenagers and young adults. MuchMusic launched on August 31 ...

. The vocals were recorded at Manta Sound Studios in downtown

on Sunday, February 10, 1985.

Gordon Lightfoot Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. (born November 17, 1938) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music. He is credited with helping to define the folk-pop sound of the 1960 ...

drove himself to the recording in a pick-up truck.

Neil Young Neil Percival Young (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian-American singer and songwriter. After embarking on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s, Young moved to Los Angeles, joining Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills, Richie Furay ...

and

Joni Mitchell Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell ( Anderson; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian-American musician, producer, and painter. Among the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her sta ...

arrived together in a taxi. Mark Holmes of Platinum Blonde arrived in a white stretch limousine. On December 22, 1985,

CBC Television CBC Television (also known as CBC TV) is a Canadian English-language broadcast television network owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster. The network began operations on September 6, 1952. Its French-l ...

aired a 90-minute documentary by

John Zaritsky John Zaritsky (13 July 1943 – 30 March 2022) was a Canadian documentarian/filmmaker. His work has been broadcast in 35 countries and screened at more than 40 film festivals around the world; in 1983, his film ''Just Another Missing Kid'' w ...

on the song and its creation. A CBC reporter, Brian Stewart, had been the first Western journalist to bring the famine in Ethiopia to worldwide attention. The film was a shortlisted

Genie Award The Genie Awards were given out annually by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to recognize the best of Canadian cinema from 1980–2012. They succeeded the Canadian Film Awards (1949–1978; also known as the "Etrog Awards," for scu ...

finalist for Best Documentary Film at the

7th Genie Awards The 7th Genie Awards were held March 20, 1986, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to honour achievements in Canadian film in 1985. The ceremony was co-hosted by Leslie Nielsen and Catherine Mary Stewart."Genie hosts announced". ''Toronto Star'' ...

in 1986. By 1990, the project had raised $3.2 million for famine relief projects in Africa. Ten percent of the funds raised was set aside to assist Canadian

food bank A food bank is a non-profit, charitable organization that distributes food to those who have difficulty purchasing enough to avoid hunger, usually through intermediaries like food pantries and soup kitchens. Some food banks distribute food direc ...

Performers

Solo vocalists (in order)

Heard in duos or trios

Mike Reno Mike Reno (born Joseph Michael Rynoski; born January 8, 1955) is a Canadian musician, singer and the lead singer of the rock band Loverboy. He is reported to have taught himself how to play guitar. He fronted other bands, including Moxy, before h ...

(

Loverboy Loverboy is a Canadian rock band formed in 1979 in Calgary, Alberta. Loverboy's hit singles, particularly " Turn Me Loose" and "Working for the Weekend", have become arena rock staples and are still heard on many classic rock and classic hits r ...

) with

Liberty Silver Liberty Silver (born 1961/1962). Indicates Detroit birthplace with Kingston, Ontario childhood. Identified as 24-year-old. is a Canadian singer, based in Toronto, Ontario. Her music draws inspiration from diverse genres, ranging from R&B, Jazz, ...

Carroll Baker Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is an American former actress. After studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Baker began performing on Broadway in 1954. From there, she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in t ...

Ronnie Hawkins Ronald Cornett Hawkins (January 10, 1935 – May 29, 2022) was an American singer-songwriter, long based in Canada, whose career spanned more than half a century. His career began in Arkansas, United States, where he was born and raised. He ...

and

Murray McLauchlan Murray Edward McLauchlan, (born 30 June 1948) is a Canadian singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and harmonica player. He is best known for his Canadian hits "Farmer's Song," "Whispering Rain," and "Down by the Henry Moore". Early life Mc ...

Véronique Béliveau Véronique Béliveau (born January 24, 1955), originally Nicole Monique, is a Canadian actress and pop/rock singer who was nominated for a 1987 Juno Award for Female Vocalist of the Year. Her first full-length album was ''Prends-moi comme je su ...

Robert Charlebois Robert Charlebois, OC, OQ (born June 25, 1944) is a Québecois author, composer, musician, performer and actor. Charlebois was born in Montreal, Quebec. Among his best known songs are ''Lindberg'' (the duo with Louise Forestier in particular ...

and

Claude Dubois Claude André Dubois (born 24 April 1947) is a Canadian singer-songwriter. Dubois was an early star of the Francophone musical '' Starmania''. He was a vocalist in the Canadian famine relief song " Tears Are Not Enough" and was nominated Most ...

(in French) *

with

Donny Gerrard Donald Bradford Gerrard (March 19, 1946 – February 3, 2022), known professionally as Donny Gerrard was a Canadian singer. He was a member of the band Skylark in the early 1970s, and in later years performed and recorded as a baritone backup si ...

(

Skylark ''Alauda'' is a genus of larks found across much of Europe, Asia and in the mountains of north Africa, and one of the species (the Raso lark) endemic to the islet of Raso in the Cape Verde Islands. Further, at least two additional species are ...

) *

Alfie Zappacosta Alfredo Peter "Alfie" Zappacosta (born July 5, 1953), also known by just his surname, is an Italian-born Canadian musician. Career Zappacosta's first band was Surrender, a five-piece group that recorded three albums in the late 1970s and earl ...

with

Lisa Dal Bello Lisa Dal Bello (born 22 May 1959), also known as Dalbello, is a Canadian musician. She released three albums in the pop and pop/rock genre in her late teens, from 1977 through 1981 under her full name. In 1984, she re-emerged as Dalbello, wit ...

Carole Pope Carole Ann Pope (born 6 August 1950) is a British-born Canadian rock singer-songwriter, whose provocative blend of hard-edged new wave rock with explicit homoerotic and BDSM-themed lyrics made her one of the first openly lesbian entertainers t ...

( Rough Trade) and

Paul Hyde Paul Reginald Nelson (born 21 May 1955), known by the stage name Paul Hyde, is a British-born Canadian singer-songwriter. He co-founded the rock band Payola$ with Bob Rock, serving as the band's main lyricist and vocalist. He later performed and ...

( The Payola$) *

Salome Bey Salome Bey (October 10, 1933 – August 8, 2020)While ''The Canadian Encyclopedia'' gives her year of birth as 1939, other sources say she was born in 1933 or 1944. was an American-born Canadian singer-songwriter, composer, and actress who liv ...

, Mark Holmes ( Platinum Blonde) and

Lorraine Segato Lorraine P. Segato (born June 17, 1956 in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian pop singer-songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist for and a principal songwriter of new wave and pop rock group The Parachute Club, with which she continues to pe ...

(

The Parachute Club The Parachute Club was a Canadian band formed in Toronto in 1982. They released three top 40 hits in Canada between 1983 and 1987, including "Rise Up", "At the Feet of the Moon" and "Love Is Fire" (which featured guest duet vocals from John O ...

)

Chorus members

Chorus members included:

Instrumentation and production

- Keyboards, Producer *Jim Vallance - Drums, Engineer, Associate Producer *Paul Dean (

) - Guitar *Steven Denroche - French Horn *Doug Johnson (

) - Synthesizer *David Sinclair ( Straight Lines / Body Electric - Acoustic guitar *Hayward Parrott - Engineer *Geoff Turner - Engineer *

(The

Payola$ Payolas (stylized as Payola$) was a Canadian rock band that was most prominent in the 1980s. Evolving from a new wave sound toward mainstream pop rock, they were best known for the single "Eyes of a Stranger", from their 1982 album '' No Stran ...

) - Engineer *

Humberto Gatica Humberto Gatica is a Chilean-born American recording engineer, mixing engineer and record producer, best known for his work with Celine Dion, Chicago, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban and Michael Bublé. Gatica's inte ...

- Mixing Engineer

Recording process

later spoke to writer Iain Blair about the recording experience: "I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was literally starving when we did the session 'cause my yoga teacher had sent me to a psychic dietician who, while rubbing her chin and swinging her arm around in a circle, had diagnosed a lot of food allergies. The result was, predictably, that I was hardly allowed to eat anything, so by the time I arrived with an apple and a rice patty, my poor stomach was making all these strange noises. Then we get in the studio, and the engineer says he can't record 'cause he's picking up some weird rumbling sound coming from my direction. (She laughed.) And it was all pretty ironic, considering the subject matter!" At one point during the recording process, Foster also had

re-record his line after singing the word "innocence" flat, to which Young famously quipped, "That's my sound, man." According to journalist

Terry David Mulligan Terry David Mulligan (born June 30, 1942) is a Canadian actor and radio and television personality based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Life and career Born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Mulligan worked as a Royal Canadian Mounted Pol ...

, singer/songwriter

Buffy Sainte-Marie Buffy Sainte-Marie, (born Beverly Sainte-Marie, February 20, 1941) is an Indigenous Canadian-American ( Piapot Cree Nation) singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. While working in these ...

was supposed to be part of the project but did not show up to recording sessions. As a result, the term "Buffy bailed" became an expression in certain Canadian music circles.

Video

The song's video opens with footage from Brian Stewart's original CBC News report on the famine, and then cuts to the performers singing the song in a studio. Near the end of the video, footage also appears from the

1985 NHL All-Star Game The 37th National Hockey League All-Star Game was held in the Olympic Saddledome in Calgary, home of the Calgary Flames, on February 12, 1985. The Wales Conference defeated the Campbell Conference 6–4. The game's most valuable player was Mario ...

Calgary Calgary ( ) is the largest city in the western Canadian province of Alberta and the largest metro area of the three Prairie Provinces. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a metropolitan population of 1,481,806, makin ...

, depicting the

Campbell Conference Campbell may refer to: People Surname * Campbell (surname), includes a list of people with surname Campbell Given name * Campbell Brown (footballer), an Australian rules footballer * Campbell Brown (journalist) (born 1968), American television ne ...

All-Stars — including

Wayne Gretzky Wayne Douglas Gretzky ( ; born January 26, 1961) is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player and former head coach. He played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) for four teams from 1979 to 1999. Nicknamed "the Great One ...

Grant Fuhr Grant Scott Fuhr (born September 28, 1962) is a Canadian former ice hockey goaltender in the National Hockey League and former goaltending coach for the Arizona Coyotes, who is best remembered for a decade of stellar play for the Edmonton Oilers i ...

Jari Kurri Jari Pekka Kurri (; born May 18, 1960) is a Finnish former professional ice hockey winger and a five-time Stanley Cup champion. In 2001, he became the first Finnish player to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2017 Kurri was named on ...

and

Miroslav Frycer Miroslav may refer to: * Miroslav (given name), a Slavic masculine given name * ''Young America'' (clipper) or ''Miroslav'', an Austrian clipper ship in the Transatlantic case oil trade * Miroslav (Znojmo District), a town in the Czech Republic S ...

— singing along as the audience waves flags and banners in the air.

2022 live version

A live version of "Tears Are Not Enough" was performed at the

Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame The Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame (''Panthéon des Auteurs et Compositeurs canadiens'') is a Canadian non-profit organization, founded in 1998 by Frank Davies, that inducts Canadians into their ''Hall of Fame'' within three different categori ...

gala in

on September 24, 2022. The rendition included many original Northern Lights members including soloists Adams, Hart, Hill and Cockburn plus new Canadian talent such as

Alessia Cara Alessia Caracciolo (born July 11, 1996), known professionally as Alessia Cara (), is a Canadian singer-songwriter. Born in Mississauga, Ontario, to Italian Canadian parents, she began posting covers of songs on YouTube at age 13. After uploadi ...

and

Charlotte Cardin Charlotte Cardin (born November 9, 1994) is a Canadian pop, electro and jazz singer and songwriter from Montreal, Quebec.

References

{{reflist

External links

Interview with Songwriter Jim Vallance on "Tears Are Not Enough"

Tears Are Not Enough deep dive on Toronto Mike'd
1985 singles Song recordings produced by David Foster Songs written by David Foster Songs written by Jim Vallance Songs written by Bryan Adams 1985 songs 1980s ballads Aid songs for Africa Anne Murray songs Bryan Adams songs RPM Top Singles number-one singles Pop ballads Gospel songs All-star recordings Charity singles Canadian pop songs Columbia Records singles Songs written by Bob Rock Canadian documentary films 1986 films 1980s Canadian films