“Once we had that chorus, it’s like everything came from that. Some songs you agonise over, but this was not one of them”: Boy Meets Girl on how having one song rejected led to them writing Whitney Houston’s biggest ‘80s hit

Whitney Houston.

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.