Songfacts®:

• After making her directorial debut with Yentl the previous year, Barbra Streisand got back to the business of recording pop music with her 23rd studio album, Emotion. In the title track, written by Peter Bliss (Peter Wolf's "I Need You Tonight" co-writer), the singer is stuck in a rut and is desperate to experience some kind of emotion to feel alive again.
• Several songwriters and producers worked on the album. For its title dance tune, Streisand tapped Richard Perry, who helmed many of her early records, including Stoney End (1970), to produce it.
• Bliss came to the studio to sing the guide vocal for Streisand's version, which was three keys higher than his original demo. The singer had trouble finding her groove at first, but with some constructive criticism from Bliss, she ended up nailing it.
  
  "She had a little difficulty finding the phrasing of the song in her first four run-throughs," Bliss told the defunct website The Barbara Streisand Music Guide. "She took me aside in the control room and asked me to be honest with her regarding her performance. Barbra commented on how great she thought my voice was (something I wish I had on tape) and listened carefully to my instructions. Finally, she thanked me for the song itself and my honesty, then proceeded to sing it better than ever. Because it felt right to Barbra and me, I didn't mind Barbra changing my line, 'Sometimes I need to turn the beat around' to 'Sometimes I need to turn it all around.'"
• This features backing vocals from The Pointer Sisters, who were the main act at Richard Perry's Planet Records label.
• This was the album's third single. It had its best showing on the Adult Contemporary chart, where it peaked at #14.
• In the music video, Streisand tries out an array of '80s glam looks in an attempt to liven up her life and get her indifferent husband, played by The Who's Roger Daltrey, to notice her. When that doesn't work, she parades around their ritzy apartment and fantasizes about other men, including Russian ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov. The clip was directed by her then-boyfriend Richard Baskin (her co-writer on "Here We Are at Last") and shot in London.
  
  Streisand spoke about the concept in a 1985 behind-the-scenes video. "How do you visualize emotion? What does emotion mean to you? I guess to everybody it's very personal, and I'm always drawn to the sensual," she explained. "We were just having fun with all the kinds of uses of emotion or the lack of it."
• The scene in the music video with a businessman dangling a string of pearls in front of the singer was inspired by one of Streisand's favorite movies, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.