My Best Friend's Wife

My Best Friend's Wife: Paul Anka's 1977 Detour Into Comic Territory

There are moments in any long career when an artist pivots in a direction their audience doesn't quite expect, and for Paul Anka in 1977, My Best Friend's Wife represented exactly that kind of calculated left turn. Anka had been a professional hit-maker since the late 1950s, had written and recorded songs that defined the era of teenage pop idolatry, and had successfully reinvented himself multiple times over. By 1977, he was a Las Vegas headliner, a respected songwriter, and a man with very little left to prove. Which perhaps explains why he was free to make something as lightly absurd as this.

A Veteran's Confidence

By 1977, Paul Anka's career credentials were formidable. He wrote "My Way," the song that would become Frank Sinatra's signature closing statement, adapting Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux's French original into an English-language monument. He had written "She's a Lady" for Tom Jones and "(You're) Having My Baby" for himself, the latter reaching number one in 1974. He had transitioned from teenage idol to adult contemporary mainstay with remarkable fluency, and he understood the pop market well enough to recognize when a lighter touch might work in his favor.

The Comic Register

There is something refreshingly unserious about My Best Friend's Wife. Where Anka's more celebrated material tended toward romantic urgency or dramatic adult sentiment, this song plays its premise for gentle comedy. The situation it describes occupies a long tradition of winking, knowing adult humor in pop music: the protagonist who finds himself attracted to someone entirely off-limits, not in a tragic way but in the manner of a man who understands perfectly well the absurdity of his own predicament. The tone is closer to a shrug and a raised eyebrow than to torment.

Brief Chart Appearance

The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 30, 1977, entering at number 89. The following week it climbed to its peak position of number 80, then disappeared from the chart. Two weeks on the Hot 100 was not the showing of a major commercial moment; this was a minor entry in a major catalog, a song that got some radio attention, found a modest audience, and then moved on. In a year when Anka had other projects demanding his attention and his Vegas residency was generating substantial revenue, a brief chart flicker probably mattered less to him than it might have to a younger artist.

The Adult Contemporary Landscape

Spring 1977 on adult contemporary radio was a crowded, competitive space. The format was home to some of the decade's most polished commercial music, and listeners had high expectations for production quality and melodic sophistication. My Best Friend's Wife delivered both, even if its comedic premise kept it from the kind of emotional gravitas that typically drove songs to the upper reaches of the chart. It was, in the most affectionate sense of the phrase, a throwaway done well.

The Longer View

Paul Anka's place in the history of American popular music was never going to be defined by a two-week chart appearance in 1977, and it wasn't. He continued recording, continued performing, and continued collecting royalties on some of the most recognizable songs of the twentieth century. The Las Vegas career that ran parallel to his recording work kept him before a loyal live audience that never stopped coming. My Best Friend's Wife survives as a pleasant artifact of a prolific career, proof that an artist of real ability can find something genuine to say even in the most comic of registers. Cue it up and enjoy it for exactly what it is: a professional having fun on his own terms.

"My Best Friend's Wife" — Paul Anka's singular moment on the 1970s charts.