Hearing "Tell It to My Heart" for the First Time on the Radio

By 1987 I'd been writing songs for about two years with a good amount of success. While I didn't yet have a hit, the artists who were recording my songs–The Spinners and The Four Tops–were not big names at the time, but it was a thrill for me to be writing songs for artists I had grown up with. One day I came up with a melody that I very much liked, but got stuck on the verse melody. I asked the guy I was co-writing with at the time, Ernie Gold, if he had any ideas. After we finished the melody, I remember writing many of the lyrics on a weekend visit to my parents' home in the big comfortable green chair in my old bedroom. After we demoed the song I listened to it and didn't like it (click here to hear the original demo). I remember thinking that I didn't want to give it to my publishing company, as they wouldn't like it either. Despite this, at the last minute I gave them the song and was surprised at how enthusiastic they were about it.

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A few months later, a budding record producer named Ric Wake called and said he had an artist named Leslie Wunderman who wanted to record the song. I said okay (a lesson to songwriters out there: say "yes" when people want to record your songs!). Ric's production of Tell It to My Heart was electrifying. All of sudden Leslie Wunderman became Taylor Dayne and was on Arista Records. The song was supposed to be released to radio in October but I wasn't paying attention because my girlfriend at the time (now my wife Jody) and I were about to leave N.Y. for a vacation in San Francisco. We landed late in the afternoon, and I turned on the radio while driving our rental car into the city. All of a sudden, the opening line from Tell It to My Heart came on! It was one of those moments. San Francisco is where the song was first played before it "hit" and we were there to hear it.

When you have a big hit lots of fun stuff happens. My two favorite things were hearing the song on the NBA finals when they went to commercial breaks and having one of Playboy’s “Playmates of the Month” use the song in her video “Playmate profile”.

Click here to see the video clip that played on MTV.