Everything came together quite quickly because it was more about capturing the enthusiasm and her fire than messing around.” Working Fast
Michael Barbiero was the engineer, he got a great sound on her with either a Shure SM7 or Neumann U87, and when she showed us the power she had, she just lit up the whole place. "So I flew to New York, met Whitney - who was a thin, gorgeous, 21-year-old model - at Media Sound in downtown Manhattan, and when I played her 'How Will I Know' she got all excited and began to sing. He got permission from its composers, George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, I added new lyrics and, after cutting the backing track at The Automatt in San Francisco - with the in-house engineers Ken Kessey and Maureen Droney during the same sessions as I was recording Aretha's Who's Zoomin' Who - I was then told that wanted the vocal recorded right away.
"So I told Gerry that if I could rewrite the song, I'd make the time. "'How Will I Know' had a strong chorus, but the verses were incomplete,” Walden recalls.
Although Walden said he was too busy to work with Houston, Griffith persisted, and the producer relented, while making a single stipulation. Meanwhile, Arista A&R exec Gerry Griffith thought Walden would be ideally suited to helm a pop-crossover song that -written for and rejected by Janet Jackson - would contrast nicely with the record's collection of ballads and R&B numbers. He was handed the former assignment while producing Aretha's Who's Zoomin' Who? LP and working on the track 'Freeway of Love'.Īs with all of Whitney Houston's albums, several producers were responsible for handling the tracks on her eponymous curtain-raiser, in this case, Jermaine Jackson, Kashif and Michael Masser. She was a hot motor scooter and she knew it.”Ī singer, songwriter and drummer, Walden produced many of Houston's biggest hits, beginning with the 1984 recording of his co-composition 'How Will I Know' for her self-titled debut album and ending with her 1992 cover of Chaka Khan's 'I'm Every Woman' for the soundtrack of her first movie, The Bodyguard. She had the voice, the looks, the whole package, so it was hard to say no to her. It was like she had been passed down the torch from her mother Cissy, godmother Darlene Love, aunt Aretha Franklin and cousin Dionne Warwick, and she was now the new champion who could go beyond all of them. "So many elements came together so effortlessly. When Whitney Houston came on the scene, we'd never seen the likes of her before,” says Narada Michael Walden. Whitney Houston with producer Narada Michael Walden. 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' was a huge global hit, but it also represented a tour de force in coaxing the perfect vocal from a singer, as explained by producer Narada Michael Walden.
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