Waiting for a Star to Fall

"Waiting for a Star to Fall" is a song by American pop music duo Boy Meets Girl in 1988, written by the duo's members, Shannon Rubicam and George Merrill. They wrote the song after witnessing a falling star at a Whitney Houston concert and originally offered the song to Houston, but Arista Records CEO Clive Davis rejected it. American singer Belinda Carlisle then recorded the song but denied its inclusion on her 1987 album Heaven on Earth, so Rubicam and Merrill decided to record and release the song themselves. "Waiting for a Star to Fall" was released in June 1988 as the second single from Boy Meets Girl's second studio album, Reel Life (1988). The song became a chart hit in several countries, reaching number five on the US Billboard Hot 100, number two in Canada, number five in Ireland, and number nine in the United Kingdom. Since its release, it has been remixed and covered by many artists, including Cabin Crew and Sunset Strippers, who experienced concurrent success with their reworkings in 2005. Background "Waiting for a Star to Fall" was written by Shannon Rubicam and George Merrill, and was inspired by an actual falling star that Rubicam had seen during a Whitney Houston concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The duo did not initially consider recording the song themselves, instead submitting it to Arista's CEO Clive Davis, in the hope that he would decide to use it on Houston's second studio album, Whitney. Even though Rubicam and Merrill had written Houston's previous hit "How Will I Know", Davis rejected "Waiting for a Star to Fall", suggesting that it did not suit her. This then inspired the creation of Houston's 1987 hit "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)". The song was then offered to and recorded by Belinda Carlisle for her 1987 release Heaven on Earth, at the insistence of her label, but Carlisle disliked it and refused to include it on the album. This version has, however, circulated on an unofficial compilation of that album's outtakes. The tenor saxophone solo on the Boy Meets Girl version was provided in a session recording early in the career of Andy Snitzer, who later found success as a solo artist.