In this jaunty pop tune, Rick Astley is overjoyed because the girl he's been waiting to see wants to dance with him. Why? Because he lets her be what she wants to be. Completely free of subtext or innuendo, it was released as the first single from his sophomore album, Hold Me In Your Arms.
Like the tracks on Astley's mega-successful debut album (the one with "Never Gonna Give You Up"), this was produced by the hitmaking team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman (Stock-Aitken-Waterman). They also wrote Astley's previous, but this was he composed himself. He wrote four songs on his first album, but "She Wants To Dance With Me" marked the first time one of his self-written songs was released as a single. When it hit, it gave him a big boost of confidence; he left Stock-Aitken-Waterman on his next album, Free, which included another hit song he wrote, "Cry For Help." "The first single I had was called 'She Wants To Dance With Me,' and that was a bit of a hit in America and different parts of the world," Astley told Songfacts. "That was a bit of a turning point in my mind because I thought, as simple as that song is - because it is fairly simple - it worked."
Astley performed this at the American Music Awards in 1989, where he was nominated for Favorite Pop/Rock New Artist (he lost to Tracy Chapman).
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