A shout of joy with a cathedral in it
Horns punch the air, a drum machine grins, and Whitney Houston’s voice arrives already at full size, asking for a partner as if the whole room had been invited to answer.
George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, who had written How Will I Know, wrote I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) for her next chapter. Narada Michael Walden produced it at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael for the album Whitney, released in 1987. The single went to No. 1 in America and Britain and won her a Grammy for best female pop vocal. Walden’s arrangement is bright on purpose, a pop record with gospel lungs: the verse is a smile, the chorus is a congregation. Houston, whose instrument could have turned any line into drama, sings joy as if it were a discipline. The key change, when it comes, is not a trick so much as a door opening on a bigger room, and she walks through it without looking down.
The writers have said they had her voice in mind, a song about wanting to dance, about happiness looking for company. She made it larger than the brief. Live, the track is a test of breath and of nerve, because the audience sings the title and she still has to be above them. She was. For years the song closed nights or blew them open, a white dress, a band that knew when to get out of the way, a voice that could smile and then scare you with its size. Radio wore it out, which is a kind of love and a kind of damage. The record survived the wear. The arrangement is so clean you can still hear the room she was aiming at, a dancefloor that also knows how to pray.
We pictured her dancing. The song was the joy, and the wish for somebody to share it.
(Shannon Rubicam, on writing for Whitney Houston)
Later years made the joy complicated, as joy in public often becomes. The song did not apologise. It stayed a major key, a request, a party that believes the request will be met. Covers tend to either over-sing it or under-sing it. The original is calibrated. Walden, who knew how to frame a great voice without burying it in effects, leaves the peaks to her and the rhythm to the machine and the band together. Merrill and Rubicam’s melody is simple enough for a crowd and shaped enough for her to decorate. That balance is the craft.
What remains is the invitation. Not a love song in the wounded sense, not a sermon, a woman at the height of her power asking to be met. The horns still sound like good news. The voice still sounds like a building. In 1987 that combination conquered charts that were not always kind to voices this large. It conquers kitchens still, which is a smaller room and a harder test. Somebody who loves me, she sings, and for three minutes the band agrees that such a person is possible, and that the right response is to dance.
