Bonnie Tyler to celebrate the eclipse by singing hit song 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'
Royal Caribbean's "Total Eclipse Cruise" passengers will have the ultimate soundtrack for Monday's solar eclipse when Bonnie Tyler sings her hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on board. Credit: Getty Images / Ragnar Singsaas
On a cruise ship Monday during the total eclipse of the sun, Bonnie Tyler will perform her 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
The cruise line Royal Caribbean announced that Tyler and the Joe Jonas-led band DNCE will perform a duet of the enduring song in the outdoor AquaTheater of the ship Oasis of the Seas, as the vessel sails toward the eclipse’s path of totality. Beginning 6:05 a.m. New York time, that 168-mile-wide shadow will proceed across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina, and continue over the Atlantic Ocean at 2:48 p.m.
“It’s going to be so exciting,” Tyler, 66, told Time magazine. “It doesn’t happen very often, does it?” The contiguous American states last experienced a total solar eclipse in 1979, according to NASA.
“The eclipse of the sun lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds, I’m told,” Tyler said, adding, “Unlike my song.” The original version on her album “Faster Than the Speed of Night” runs 7 minutes 2 seconds, but it was released as 4-minute-29-second single for radio airplay. “It had to be chopped about, because it was so long,” the Welsh singer explained. “I never thought it would be played on the radio, in the beginning.”
Tyler said she and DNCE will rehearse together the day before. “So if anybody hears strange noises coming from my cabin while aboard ship, they’ll know what it is,” she joked. Tyler plays the Batroun International Festival in Lebanon on Friday and the seven-night cruise departs Port Canaveral, Florida, on Sunday afternoon.
Penned and produced by Meat Loaf songwriter-producer Jim Steinman, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was released June 12, 1983 and certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America that October, when it hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. It went platinum, representing 1 million units sold in the United States, in September 2001. The BBC reported in 2009 that the single by then had sold six million copies worldwide. One of Tyler’s three Grammy Award nominations, best pop vocal performance, female (1983), came for this song.
Royal Caribbean had announced the cruise, without listing performers, on June 1.
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