Corey Hart

Canadian pop star Corey Hart was born May 31, 1962, in Montreal, Canada. Making connections at an early age, Hart auditioned as a singer for both Paul Anka and Tom Jones before he was a teenager. At 18 he sent homemade demos to Billy Joel, getting a positive reply from a member of Joel’s band that led to gigs. His debut album, 1983’s First Offense took off when the video for the first single, the brooding synth driven “Sunglasses at Night”, became an enormous hit on MTV. The album went top 10 in Canada and top 40 in the United States, while the single was a US top 10. 1985’s Boy in the Box catapulted him further with the inspirational power ballad “Never Surrender”. The number 3 US hit and topped the Canadian charts, and winning a Juno award for best selling single. Another single, “Everything in My Heart”, was a Canadian number 1. Through the rest of the decade he would continue to chart big hits in his home country including a cover of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” that was his third number 1. By the early 90s, Hart began writing material for other Canadian acts trying to break into the American market, including Julie Massse, who would become Hart’s wife. After 1998’s Jade, Hart essentially retired as a performing artist in favor of being a family man. He started his own record label in 2003, occasionally writing songs for artists. At the beginning of the 2010’s Hart began to perform again, releasing the EP Ten Thousand Horses in 2014. That same year he marked his 30^th anniversary as a recording artist with what he called a farewell concert in Montreal. He was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2016, and played live occasionally throughout the decade. In 2020 he released a new version of “Never Surrender” that directly addressed the COVID-19 epidemic.