This Heartfelt 1989 Ballad No. 1, Which Also Soared In Spanish, Reached The Top 37 Years Ago Today

"Don't Wanna Lose You" by Gloria Estefan is among the best (and dreamiest) slow songs of the '80s, as well as one of the most timeless '80s love ballads, and in mid-September of 1989, it was the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Spanish-centric Hot Latin Tracks. It also marked the full arrival of an '80s and '90s mega-star. 

Estefan's rise to stardom began in the mid-70s, when as Gloria Fajardo, she became a singer for the Miami Latin Boys, a group founded by Emilio Estefan Jr. that was soon renamed as the Miami Sound Machine. With a bandmate romance that would shape music history, Estefan and Fajardo married, and Gloria Estefan became the act's lead singer. They released four Spanish-language albums before crossing over to the broader, bigger, English-speaking market with dance hits that heavily incorporated Latin American musical forms. Songs like "Bad Boy" and "Conga!" made Gloria Estefan famous, so much so that the Miami Sound Machine started going by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine in 1987.

After having some success with adult contemporary ballads such as "Anything for You," the act pulled back on the Latin influences and dropped the "Miami Sound Machine" from the name entirely, releasing music as just Gloria Estefan. In September 1989, Estefan scored her first de facto hit as a solo artist when the tender "Don't Wanna Lose You" went all the way to No. 1 for a week.

While "Don't Wanna Lose You" sounds like so many other slow, synth-powered songs that dominated soft rock radio in the late 1980s, and is devoid of the Latin American musical traditions that made the Miami Sound Machine so unique, pioneering, and exciting to pop fans earlier in the decade, Gloria Estefan didn't entirely exclude her fans who preferred her Spanish work. A song about enduring rough patches and declaring an intention to stay in a relationship despite tough times, while also asserting personal independence and resolve, Estefan composed both the words and lyrics of "Don't Wanna Lose You" alone, inspired by her spouse and bandmate, Emilio Estefan.

Among the final two songs conceived and recorded for the LP "Cuts Both Ways," "Don't Wanna Lose You" appears in a different version at the end of the album: Estefan made a Spanish version, "Si Voy a Perderte," or "If I am going to lose you." When "Don't Wanna Lose You" rose to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in September 1989, "Si Voy a Perderte" simultaneously climbed to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Latin Tracks list. That marked the first of 15 times that Estefan, as a solo act, would top that chart. "Don't Wanna Lose You," in its English iteration, would go on to earn Estefan a Grammy nomination for best female pop vocal performance.