Pat Benatar

With roof-rattling, opera-trained pipes and a pure rock 'n' roll heart, Pat Benatar powered her way to the top of what was still a very male-dominated rock scene in the late '70s and early '80s. She grabbed the brass ring with sharp, sexy singles like "Heartbreaker" and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," riding a seemingly bottomless bounty of hard-rocking hooks from guitarist Neil Giraldo — Pat's partner in life and music — and setting the stage for the rise of tough-but-tuneful gals from Joan Jett to Melissa Etheridge. In the '80s, Benatar turned to a subtler, more sophisticated sound, which still packed plenty of punch, scoring her biggest hit ever with the dance-floor-ready beat and tear-stained story of "Love Is a Battlefield."

Benatar pursues her muse, from new wave to the blues, in Next Steps.

Pat Benatar made her name with a string of taut, tough, hard-rocking hits, but the little lady with the big, belting voice was never tied to a single style. "Tough Life" makes a surefooted shift between a breakneck rock pace and the slinky, skanking rhythms of reggae. The chattering synths and tension-packed punch of "Anxiety (Get Nervous)" show that she was ready to ride the rising tide of new wave in the early '80s. But she entered the '90s with one of her most unpredictable moves of all, delivering an album of sassy, swinging blues tunes like B.B. King's "Payin' the Cost to Be the Boss," with the boys from Roomful of Blues amping up the smoky, Chicago nightclub vibe.

Tap into the tender side of the Benatar story, in Deep Cuts.

Pat Benatar may have made her biggest commercial impact in the spandex-splattered '80s, but she was always in it for the long haul, and she never stopped exploring and evolving. In the '90s, she tapped into a quieter kind of expression without sacrificing a single ounce of intensity, by slipping into an acoustic-based chamber-pop mode for heart-tugging tunes like "Every Time I Fall Back" and the fractured-family narrative "Papa's Roses." But even as early as her second album, she showed a more contemplative side, covering English art-rocker Kate Bush's Emily Bronte-based "Wuthering Heights," and giving "gothic rock" a whole new meaning.

Pat Benatar is a study in contrasts — a petite songbird with powerhouse pipes that could rip the roof off an arena; a classically trained singer who became a raging rock 'n' roll queen; a sensuous, stage-strutting vixen who warned against using "Sex As a Weapon." Her multiplatinum monster of a career has made her not only a mainstay of classic-rock radio for three decades and counting, but also a continuing inspiration to young women everywhere who harbor rock 'n' roll dreams. In serving up a bounty of Benatar, we've harnessed the power of hits like "Promises in the Dark" and "Shadows of the Night" — tunes that prompt an automatic "Crank it up!" whenever they turn up on the car radio. But we've also taken the path less traveled through Pat's rich past, coming up with less obvious but equally undeniable choices to complete our full-color sonic portrait of a true rock trailblazer.