Songfacts®:

• Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb play the part of lovers on her Guilty album, which was produced by Gibb and his Bee Gees collaborators Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson. The title track is a duet where they unabashedly proclaim their feelings for each other, but they let the heartache in on "What Kind Of Fool," a bittersweet remembrance of a romance torn apart by betrayal.
• When Barry Gibb signed on to write and produce Streisand's 22nd studio album, he intended to stay behind the scenes and only contribute backing vocals on the tracks, but her manager convinced him to do a couple of duets to boost the album's appeal with the Bee Gees-loving public that made the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack a massive hit. As a result, "Guilty" and "What Kind Of Fool" were written as solo tunes and reworked as duets. Karl Richardson remembered how the latter came together.
  
  "[Barry] did the demo first," he explained in The Billboard Book of Number One Adult Contemporary Hits. "Barbra sang to the demo, then he came back and replaced a couple of things after he had heard what she was doing."
• This spent four straight weeks at #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, making it the seventh AC chart-topper of her career.
• Galuten borrowed a drum loop from the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" and slowed it down for this track (it also appears on Guilty's first single, "Woman In Love"). The loop is credited to fictional drummer Bernard Lupe, but there's also a real drummer on the ballad: Steve Gadd. The prolific session drummer manned the sticks for many top acts, including Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Kate Bush, and Eric Clapton, among others.
• With 12 million copies sold worldwide this is the best-selling album of Streisand's career. The Gibb-Galuten-Richardson team went on to produce Dionne Warwick's 1982 Heartbreaker album (featuring the hit title track) and Kenny Rogers' 1983 Eyes That See In The Dark album (boasting the Rogers/Parton duet "Islands In The Stream") before going their separate ways.
• Before trading vocals with Gibb, Streisand partnered with Neil Diamond on "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" and Donna Summer on "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)."
• Galuten tried to understand how Gibb's conversations with Streisand translated into the songs on the album. "I asked him a couple of times and he just said, 'There's a well down there, and I just put the rope down and pull something out,'" he told Albumism in 2020.
  
  "I think I have kind of an understanding because Barry taps into the collective unconscious. In the same way that he could come up with a phrase like 'Night Fever,' he would think about what was in the zeitgeist for Barbra. It didn't really matter what Barbra was. What mattered was how she appeared to the world and how that could be molded into something that she would be comfortable with, and that resonated with people's view of her. That's what makes a great songwriter is [that] ability."
• Darren Criss, who portrayed Blaine Anderson on Glee, sang an a cappella cover for the show's 2011 soundtrack, Glee: The Music Presents The Warblers. The song wasn't, however, featured on an episode.