Randy VanWarmer entered the world on March 30, 1955, in Indian Hills, Colorado, and remains best known for the 1979 pop smash “Just When I Needed You Most.” Following the fatal 1967 car crash that claimed his father, he and his mother moved to Cornwall, England, where he started composing and playing music during his teenage years. Returning to the United States in 1978, he took up residence in Woodstock, New York, and soon secured a contract with the local Bearsville imprint. The label released his first album, Warmer, in 1979; although he had written the material at age eighteen, the ballad “Just When I Needed You Most” managed to pierce disco-saturated airwaves and climbed to number four on the Billboard chart.
Terraform arrived as his second album in 1980, with Beat of Love following in 1981. Neither set registered on the pop charts, yet VanWarmer’s profile as a songwriter rose sharply once Alabama carried “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why)” to the top of the country listings in 1982. Issued in 1983, his fourth solo outing The Things That You Dream met with steadily declining sales, yet the Oak Ridge Boys scored a number-one country hit the next year with his composition “I Guess It Never Hurts to Hurt Sometimes.” VanWarmer shifted his base to Nashville in 1985 to focus on country material. He reemerged as a recording artist in 1988 with the album I Am, which yielded the charting singles “I Will Hold You” and “Where the Rocky Mountains Touch the Morning Sun.” Later releases comprised Every Now and Then in 1990, The Vital Spark in 1994, and Third Child in 1995. After an extended struggle with leukemia, he died in Seattle on January 12, 2004.
