Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) is now so embedded in popular culture that a world without it seems unthinkable. However, songwriters George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam say that, had it not been for the fact that Clive Davis had turned down another song that they’d written for Houston, it might never have existed.
Speaking to Vertex Effects, Merrill and Rubicam confirm that, having given Houston a hit with How Will I Know on her eponymous 1985 debut album, they were asked by Davis - who was guiding Houston’s career at the time - to submit a song for her second LP, which would end up being 1987’s Whitney.
“As I recall, Clive called, needed another song,” says Rubicam. “I think he was surely looking for an uptempo song from us because that's what How I Know had been and it sort of filled that bill for rounding out the album. And so we wrote Waiting For a Star to Fall.”
That, of course, is the song that Merrill and Rubicam would end up having a huge hit with themselves as Boy Meets Girl, but Davis politely declined it - possibly without Whitney ever even hearing it.
“I think it was dead in its tracks with him because Clive always sounds very clear about what it is that he wants and when he hears it, he knows it,” says Rubicam. “And so Waiting For a Star to Fall didn't quite fit the bill and so we went back to the drawing board.”
Merrill and Rubicam were understandably disappointed, but after licking their wounds, they retreated to their garage studio to try and cook up something else.
“We thought, ‘well, we can't let the opportunity go, we've got to write one more song,’” remembers Rubicam. “And we wanted to write a song that was airtight, that was just so solid on its own, you know, so it could be uptempo, it could be a ballad, it was just going to be and it would be something we could all sing and so I think that was generally our approach.”
“The rejection probably cleared the way for I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” says Merrill. He also admits that, looking back, Davis’s hunch that Waiting For A Star To Fall was a great song but not quite right for Houston was probably correct.
And fortunately, it didn’t take Merrill and Rubicam to strike gold once again. Rubicam says that, when the pair are writing together, they generally start with the lyrics, and that in the case of I Wanna Dance With Somebody, she had a clear visual in her head.
“I could just see somebody single watching the clock - ‘it’s four o’clock, it’s five o’clock and I don’t have anything to do tonight’ - feeling isolated and alone. I just pictured that someone would go out and really what they’re looking for is connection and love and, you know, something real, something authentic.”
Musically, Merrill says that they were being influenced by the likes of new-wave synth-pop outfit Missing Persons at the time, and that this impacted the sound of the I Wanna Dance with Somebody demo they recorded.
“You can hear the PPG synth in the intro - it’s kind of this clappy sort of thing - and it comes on… it’s like a big, brash, out-of-the-box opening,” says Merrill. “I just wanted to get everybody’s attention, drum machines just banging away.”
Rubicam goes on to say that the song was written not at the piano but on a synth - a classic Roland one, it turns out. “I remember the Jupiter-8,” says Merrill. “I remember standing there in a parka.” (This was a garage studio they were working in, remember.)
And the writing process didn’t take long: “I think it was a few days,” says Merrill. “It came in quickly.”
“Once we had that chorus, it’s like everything came from that,” adds Rubicam. “Some songs you agonise over, but this was not one of them.”
Keen to impress Clive Davis, Merrill and Rubicam booked studio time and hired session players to create the finished demo. “Once we had it, George called up Clive Davis and he said, ‘I've got this song. We've got another demo,” says Rubicam.
It turned out that Davis was at LAX airport in Los Angeles - just a short hop from where Merrill and Rubicam were living - so Rubicam jumped in his car and drove over there to give him the demo personally.
“I did my run through the airport thing, and there there was Clive with his briefcase and he was ready to get on his flight, and I handed him a cassette,” he says.
Armed with a Walkman, presumably, Davis listened to the tape while he was in the air, and called when he landed. Fearful of what he might say, Merrill says that he tried to pre-empt another rejection by stating that he’d quite like the song for his and Rubicam’s Boy Meets Girl album, but Davis was having none of it.
“He told me to eff off, I think,” says Merrill. “The gist of it was he was keeping it for Whitney.”
After that, things moved fast. It was decided that I Wanna Dance With Somebody would be the first single from Houston’s second album, and - based on the successful job he did with How Will I Know - Narada Michael Walden was enlisted to produce.
But, of course, it’s Whitney’s star wattage that powers the finished song, and it was her idea to include the call-and-response ‘don’t cha wanna dance/say you wanna dance’ vocal parts towards the end.
“She presented that and I think that as she riffed with it, Narada ran with it,” reckons Merrill.
I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) hit number 1 in charts around the world, and has been played at weddings and kitchen discos pretty much ever since. “The whole thing was so stratospheric,” says Merrill. “We were just in uncharted territory, I think, right off the bat.”
And, even today, Merrill gets a kick out of it. He admits that, when it comes on in a grocery store he still gets giddy: “I’ll say to some shopper behind me, I go, ‘I wrote this, man.’”
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