Some time in 1981, future “Songwriters Hall of Fame” member Darryl Hall was sitting at the piano in his Greenwich Village apartment.
His girlfriend Sara was in the kitchen peeling a hard-boiled egg.
Hall had a pencil in his mouth. He played a chord on the piano. He took the pencil and scribbled down a few words on a piece of paper.
Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater… and a commitmentphobe.
“Terrible!” Hall said. He crumpled up the paper and threw it on the floor.
Sara walked into the living room. She swallowed the first half of her hard-boiled egg. “What’s up?” she asked.
“So frustrating,” Hall said. “This new Maneater thing. I have the intro. ‘She’s sitting with you but her eyes are on the door.’ Right? A little story. Everybody can picture that.”
Sara stuffed the other half of the egg in her mouth. She raised her eyebrows to indicate to Hall to keep going.
“But then I get to the chorus,” Hall said. “It’s really the payload of the song. It’s what I want the listener to take away. But I can’t find a good way to wrap it up. ‘She’s a maneater and a… dirty nasty bitch? A cruel seductive girl? A womanhater?’ I can’t figure out how to end it with something people haven’t heard before.”
Sara finished chewing the egg and swallowed. She walked to the crumpled-up paper, picked it up off the floor, and looked over the lyrics.
“Drop that shit at the end,” she said. “Go, ‘She’s a maneater.’ And stop.”
Hall frowned. Then he really frowned. “You’re crazy.” he said. “That’s messed up.”
Sara rolled her eyes and walked back to the kitchen. Hall stared at the piano. He closed his eyes. He played a few notes. And he started to nod his head.
In the end, Darryl Hall dropped the shit at the end, as per his girlfriend’s advice. Hall & Oates recorded the song a few days later.
Maneater became a number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on December 18, 1982. Out of the five number one hits that Hall & Oates had in their career, Maneater became the one that stayed at no. 1 the longest. Going by the 172 million views the song has on YouTube, it remains their biggest hit today.
“I thought about it,” Hall said once when speaking about Maneater and about his girlfriend’s suggestion. “I realized she was right. And it made all the difference.”