Hall & Oates: Maneater - on American Bandstand - October 16, 1982 (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit)

Daryl Hall & John Oates – Maneater - on American Bandstand - October 16, 1982 (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit) w/Dick Clark Interview. Note the Lead Guitarist: GE Smith who went on to lead the SNL Band.

"Maneater" is a song by American duo Hall & Oates, featured on their eleventh studio album, H2O (1982). It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on December 18, 1982. It remained in the top spot for four weeks, longer than any of the duo's five other number-one hits, including "Kiss on My List", which remained in the top spot for three weeks.

In an interview with American Songwriter in 2009, Daryl Hall recalled,

John had written a prototype of "Maneater"; he was banging it around with Edgar Winter. It was like a reggae song. I said, "Well, the chords are interesting, but I think we should change the groove." I changed it to that Motown kind of groove. So we did that, and I played it for Sara Allen and sang it for her…[Sings] "Oh here she comes / Watch out boy she’ll chew you up / Oh here she comes / She's a maneater… and a…" I forget what the last line was. She said, "drop that shit at the end and go, 'She's a maneater,' and stop! And I said, 'No, you’re crazy, that's messed up.'" Then I thought about it, and I realized she was right. And it made all the difference in the song.

Hall also opined, "We try and take chances. Our new single "Maneater" isn't something that sounds like anything else on the radio. The idea is to make things better."

John Oates has explained that while it is natural to assume the lyrics are about a woman, the song actually was originally written "about NYC in the ’80s. It's about greed, avarice, and spoiled riches. But we have it in the setting of a girl because it's more relatable. It's something that people can understand. That's what we do all of the time", after describing how they took a similar approach with the earlier song "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)".

Billboard called it a "moody mid-tempo piece which has the percolating bass line of a mid-60's Supremes record and the atmospheric sweep of a Giorgio Moroder film score." Cash Box said that the opening bass-line resembles that of the Supremes' song "You Can't Hurry Love."