– George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam wrote this song. They met when they both performed at the wedding of Seattle socialite Susan Boeing and began playing clubs in the Northwest US. In 1985, they released an album as Boy Meets Girl and wrote Houston’s hit “How Will I Know.” A year after this was released, they had a hit with “Waiting For A Star To Fall.”
Merrill: “I think the biggest deal for Shannon and me was that we had had this meteoric success with ‘How Will I Know,’ that was the biggest thing that had ever happened for us in our career, and then to be asked to come up with another one, well, we just looked at each other. We thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of what this is about, it’s not about the one song and goodbye. This is part of the fun of it, this is gonna be something that we want to continue, so we just went to work.'”
Rubicam: “That song got written pretty quickly, as I recall. We had a funky little garage studio at the time, and we just hung out in there one afternoon and wrote the song, and I know we tweaked it the next day, and started recording it on our little Teac 4-track deck that we were using.”
– Houston sang this very upbeat and light, but the lyrics are quite emotional, which is why they included “(Who Loves Me)” after “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” in the song title. Says Rubicam: “Many of our friends were in this boat – 5 o’clock comes around, they start getting restless and it’s, ‘What am I gonna do?’ and ‘I can’t stand to be alone again tonight,’ and ‘I really don’t wanna just go party, I’d really like to find somebody, try and find somebody to love.’ So it’s more of that long-term partnership that people want.”
This fell in the middle of a remarkable seven-song run of US #1 hits for Whitney Houston that were spread across her first two albums. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” was the lead single from her second album, Whitney. It was guaranteed airplay but exceeded even the sky-high expectations that came with it – the single sold 3 million copies in America while the album moved 9 million. The upbeat tune was the perfect song to kick off the album; the next single was the ballad “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.”
This won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. It also took the American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Single.
