Songfacts®:

• Written by Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, this is a duet between Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand for Streisand's 1980 album, Guilty. In the easy-listening ballad, the singers unapologetically express their love for each other, claiming there's "nothing to be guilty of" in their romance.
  
  Streisand didn't feel any guilt about recording the tune, either. "It had a breezy, almost jazz-like quality that I just loved," she's quoted by the Barbra Archives.
• Barry Gibb, who produced the album with his Bee Gees production team, Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten, didn't want to do any duets on the album. His goal was to create the most successful album of Streisand's career, and he didn't want to take the focus off of her. But her manager, Charles Koppelman, thought pairing Barry and Barbra's vocals would make the songs even more popular, so he convinced him to change his mind. Streisand had already done a solo version of "Guilty," so turning it into a duet proved to be quite the challenge.
  
  "We'd already cut the track," Galuten told Albumism in 2020. "So, for his verses, we had to change the key and had worked out modulations to go from one key to another, from verse to chorus, and then overdub the instruments, fit them in, and fly that stuff around to literally create the verses for Barry that were in another key. Wherever Barry sang verses, those were never recorded in that key - they were originally recorded in different keys in different parts with everything but the drums."
• It also took two weeks of careful editing to combine the vocals and adjust Streisand's to match Gibb's style. "Barry's feeling and his vision is that meter is pretty much on time," Galuten continued. "There's a beat and it goes right there. And the same thing with the pitch - you don't really scoop into pitches, you just…you're supposed to hit the pitch and nail it. So, in order to adjust Barbra's vocal so that it met with Barry's sensibility, we were moving the time - and this was before the days of sampling and being able to move vocals around - with these little tiny offsets and fractions and punch-ins and delays. And doing the same thing with harmonizers to do three or four passes at the beginning of a vocal word so it would hit it right on and not slide up the way Barbra liked to do."
• Like the album's lead single, "Woman In Love," this finds Streisand taking charge of her love life and not backing down. The songs were written specifically for her to sing, which make them stand out from the Gibbs' Bee Gees songs. "It's interesting how the lyrics are Barbra-relevant rather than Bee Gees-relevant," Galuten told Albumism. "'I've got nothing to be guilty of' is sort of the whole Jewish guilt thing. It's the same thing with 'I am a woman in love.' It's uncompromising. It's not 'I love you, please come back to me,' it's 'I love you and I'm strong about it.' It's Barbra's image and the things that were relevant to her, and Barry was writing about them with her in mind."
• If the line "Eyes can see that we got a highway to the sky" sounds familiar, it's because a similar lyric showed up in the Bee Gees hit "Too Much Heaven" the previous year: "You and me girl got a highway to the sky."
• After being named the most successful female artist in the US at the end of the '70s, Streisand entered the '80s with the best-selling album of her career. Guilty went to #1 on albums charts across the globe, including the US, where she hadn't had a chart-topping album since 1974's The Way We Were. It also sold 12 million copies worldwide.
• This won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Duo or Group at the 1981 ceremony.
• Barry Gibb's 1979 demo version is included on the 2006 compilation The Guilty Demos.
• The Australian band Human Nature released this as a single from their 2004 album, Walk The Tightrope. Their version, which introduced the rapper Kelly K.A.E., peaked at #33 in Australia.
• Tom Jones and Gladys Knight recorded this in 1997 for Jones' album Tom Jones And Friends Live!
• This was used in the comedy films Madea's Witness Protection (2012) and Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar (2021).