Hostage

Hostage was an Ontario club band of the early 1980s, fronted by Ottawa singer Donna O'Connor. O'Connor had started young. At seventeen she sang the national anthem with her father, Dillon O'Connor, through a season of Ottawa Rough Riders home games, and she took roles in Bye Bye Birdie, West Side Story and Anne of Green Gables. With Hostage she toured Canada and the United States. In Thunder Bay the band played the Expressway/Landmark Inn in November 1982 and came back in June 1983 and twice in early 1984. Jackie Findlay, a classically trained guitarist from Belleville who had studied music at Queen's University, toured with O'Connor and the band for a time.

Bill McDowell of Hostage wrote both songs on this single, and the group cut them at Manta Sound in Toronto with violinist Hugh Marsh producing. Marsh had been playing with Bruce Cockburn since 1979, and in 1983 the two had recorded Cockburn's theme for the film Waterwalker at the same studio. Cockburn sings with O'Connor on 'Play It By Heart', the five-minute B-side. The record came out on O.M. Records through True Reflection Management in Sudbury, with Gilles Lapointe credited for "Motivation and Direction". It was O'Connor's first record.

O'Connor later settled in Toronto and made her career as a live and studio singer, opening for Glen Campbell, Burton Cummings, Three Dog Night, James Brown, Patti LaBelle and Dionne Warwick.

-Robert Williston