Belinda Carlisle
Belinda Jo Carlisle (/ˈkɑːrlaɪl/ KAR-lyle; born August 17, 1958) is an American singer and songwriter. She gained fame as the lead vocalist of the Go-Go's, the most successful all-female rock band of all time,[1] and went on to have a prolific career as a solo artist.
Not to be confused with Brandi Carlile.
Belinda Carlisle
- Belinda Jo
- Dottie Danger
- Belinda Jo Kurczeski
- Singer
- songwriter
- actress
- memoirist
1977–present
1
- James Mason (father-in-law)
- Pamela Mason (mother-in-law)
- Portland Mason (sister-in-law)
Raised in Southern California, Carlisle became the lead vocalist of the Go-Go's after the band's formation in 1978. With their chart-topping debut studio album Beauty and the Beat in 1981, the group helped popularize new wave music in the United States. The Go-Go's were the first (and to date only) all-female band in history who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to achieve a No. 1 album. The Go-Go's have sold over seven million records worldwide.[2]
After the break-up of the Go-Go's in 1985, Carlisle went on to have a successful solo career with radio hits such as "Mad About You", "I Get Weak", "Circle in the Sand", "Leave a Light On", and "Heaven Is a Place on Earth". The Go-Go's reformed in 1999, and Carlisle performed with them until their disbandment in 2022, while also maintaining her solo career.
Carlisle's autobiography, Lips Unsealed, published in June 2010, was a New York Times Best Seller and received favorable reviews.[3] In 2011, Carlisle, as a member of the Go-Go's, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[4] She and the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.[5]
Activism[edit]
Carlisle supports LGBT rights, which she made public after her son, Duke, came out to her at age fourteen.[84]
In 2014, Carlisle co-founded Animal People Alliance,[85] a nonprofit organization based in Calcutta, India, that raises funds and trains and employs impoverished women to care for street animals. "We are teaching people that animals have feelings," says Carlisle. "How to recognize a street animal in distress. There is a middle class developing and they still don't have proper vet care, so a lot of what we do will be educational. We're partnering with a hospital in Calcutta to teach about adoption and to get access to emergency rooms."[85]
In popular culture[edit]
In 1999, Carlisle was ranked No. 76 with the Go-Go's in VH1's 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll.[86] In 2018, a series of Progressive Corporation commercials paid homage to her song "Heaven Is a Place on Earth." In 2016, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" was featured prominently in "San Junipero," an episode of the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror, which contains LGBT themes and is set in the future, but has scenes set in a facsimile of the late 1980s. In 2020, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" was the song featured in Season 5, Episode 4 of the CW's Legends of Tomorrow, "Slay Anything," which was also set in the late 1980s, and featured both straight and LGBT characters in a high school prom setting, which had a happy ending.
Studio albums