Songfacts®:

• When Kim Carnes was asked to write a duet to sing with Barbra Streisand, the rasp-throated "Bette Davis Eyes" singer was flattered but skeptical.
  
  "I thought, 'That is so bizarre and it will never work in a million years because our voices are so different. I can't pull this off,'" she told Rolling Stone in 2015.
  
  But to her surprise, she came up with "Make No Mistake, He's Mine" in just a couple hours.
  
  "It's a love triangle and these two girls are singing back and forth to each other about being in love with the same dude. It just wrote itself," she continued. "I knew as I sang it that it was the perfect song for Barbra's voice and for my voice. I could sing it the way I sing ballads. She could sing it the way she sings ballads. Nobody had to be another person."
• Streisand hadn't recorded a new studio album since her 1980 bestseller, Guilty, because she'd been busy filming the movie Yentl. Unlike Guilty, which was made up of tracks written by its producer, Barry Gibb, Emotion was the work of several different composers and producers. The Carnes/Streisand duet was produced by Carnes and her keyboard player Bill Cuomo, who put together the demo and presented it to Streisand.
• After hearing the demo, Streisand invited Carnes and Cuomo to her Beverly Hills home to rehearse the duet. "It's just the three of us," Cuomo told Pop Matters in 2017. "I'm in her living room playing piano. I got Barbra and Kim singing. You could have hit me with a feather and knocked me off that piano stool! I'm listening to them sing and I'm thinking, Oh, man! This is going to be great. It was just fantastic. It was like they were whispering in your ear." Cuomo likened the unlikely vocal pairing to "silk and gravel."
• According to Cuomo, the only change Streisand wanted to make from the demo version to the master was using a real orchestra instead of relying on synth strings.
• This was Streisand's 30th Top-10 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart, where it peaked at #8. Carnes also had a handful of AC hits to her credit. Earlier that year, she landed at the top of the tally with "What About Me?" - a collaboration with Kenny Rogers and James Ingram.
• In 1987, Ronnie Milsap and Kenny Rogers reimagined this as a duet between two men fighting over a woman. Their version, titled "Make No Mistake, She's Mine" was a #1 hit on the Country chart.