His first album upon returning was named after the biggest hit song that he was covering on it, "Up, Up and Away", which The 5th Dimension took to number seven on the pop chart just months earlier. Several more cover albums named after other people's hit songs made the album charts throughout the 1970s, his most successful one being "You Light Up My Life" from 1978, which had the original hit song "Too Much, Too Little, Too Late" to help it reach number nine on the album chart and Platinum certification. He tried more duets and new songs on subsequent releases but was unable to re-create this sort of magic with the lightweight pop he was used to offering. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were the production team behind their own band Chic's number ones "Le Freak" and "Good Times as well as the Sister Sledge hits "He's the Greatest Dancer" and "We Are Family". In February 1981 Mathis entered the studio to record songs that the duo had written and were producing as his next album, which was given the same name as one of the tracks, "I Love My Lady". The project was completed, but "nobody said anything over at Columbia, and a best-of album ["The First 25 Years – The Silver Anniversary Album"] came out instead." When asked in a 2011 radio interview as to why the album had never been released, Mathis gave a brief chuckle as he replied, "Probably because the record company is almighty when you're making music to sell. They have their likes and dislikes...I guess because they didn't think it would sell." The singer pressed on through the early 1980s with more albums of new material that had unimpressive sales, as was the case with "Right from the Heart", which became only his third out of 55 studio releases that did not make one of the album charts in "Billboard". In 1983 Linda Ronstadt took a break from recording contemporary music in order to make an album of standards with conductor Nelson Riddle, and their collaboration, "What's New" went triple Platinum. Barbra Streisand's 1985 release "The Broadway Album" reached number one and went on to quadruple Platinum certification, so a renewed interest in what came to be known as traditional pop was evident. Mathis had not tried a studio album without current hits or new songs since the ill-fated "Broadway" project in 1965, so his choice to collaborate with Henry Mancini in 1986 for "The Hollywood Musicals", which had a lineup of classics that were mostly from the 1940s, was quite a change of pace.