Waiting for a Star to Fall

Boy Meets Girl are American songwriters George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam. They spoke with us about this song and explained how they got together:

Shannon: "We met at a large Seattle socialite wedding for one of the Boeing daughters of Boeing Airplanes. Then we met again later when I went to see George and his singing partner at the time at a club and thought, 'Wow, they're really good. And cute.'"

George: "I had been pretty smitten by Shannon when I first saw her at the wedding. It was Susan Boeing of Boeing Companies, and all the Seattle musicians at the time were hired to perform some function at the wedding, either performing at the wedding or the after party or something. I was singing in the choir in the loft, and Shannon was singing the solo, so her voice was going out throughout the entire church, and I thought, 'Oh my goodness, where did that voice come from?'"

Shannon: "We met a year later and I ended up joining his duo at the time to make it a trio so we could have extra harmony layers. We played the Seattle club scene and up and down the coast, until we got stone tired of playing clubs and dealing with people who were on their way to being drunk, and then well past that line. We ended up moving down to Los Angeles after we wrote and recorded a batch of songs, and sent tapes out and actually got a response from one of those wild card tapes we sent out."

George and Shannon wrote Whitney Houston's hits "How Will I Know" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)." They got the idea for this song when they were at a Whitney Houston concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles:

Shannon: "It's a beautiful venue. It's an outdoor kind of amphitheater built on the Greek forum idea, and so it has an open air - no ceiling. Whitney had just finished playing How Will I Know."

George: "It was a big night for us. There we are in a crowd of 8,000 people standing on their feet cheering to one of our songs."

Shannon: "It was cool. At the end I looked up at the sky - because it was a clear night, the stars were out - and a star just shot across the sky just right through the middle of the dome. I just quickly jotted down a line, 'Waiting for a star to fall,' and stuffed it back in my purse. As we were driving home, I told George about it, and said, 'I think I'll write a lyric around that.' We thought, 'That's fortuitous, we got the idea at a Whitney concert, we should send it to Clive (Davis) for Whitney for her next album.' So we did, and he sent it back saying it wasn't what they were looking for because they were doing a little bit of a direction shift with her. So we thought, 'Well, we'll just do it ourselves, cool.' So it worked out fine for us to do it."

George and Shannon got married after Reel Life was released, but they were going through a great deal of turmoil in their relationship while they were writing the album:

Shannon: "Things were difficult to talk through sometimes. We just ended up keeping our musical diary going and that really was our uniting factor. So a lot of the songs are reflective of that, even if they sound initially upbeat musically, I think really it was a tough time for us, and thank God for music."

George: "Yeah, and there was a level at which I think Shannon and I had a mutual admiration for each other and the process of writing together. And also, it's a relationship thing where if Shannon needed to get a thought out musically, I wanted to assist her, and I think it was both ways: if we had a song that was kind of a sensitive topic, there was a level that the two of us would just write our way through it."

Shannon: "It's a lament for what appears to be unattainable to you. It does have some poignancy, it did for us at that time."