These 3 Hitmakers Wrote Songs for Whitney Houston (And Even Had Hits of Their Own)

Behind every big artist is a songwriter with a story of their own to tell. Here are some of the minds behind a few of Whitney Houston‘s biggest hits and some songs of theirs you might be familiar with.

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Boy Meets Girl

If you know Houston’s hit songs “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and “Higher Love”, you’ll likely enjoy the work of then-husband-and-wife duo George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, or Boy Meets Girl. If you listen to their 1988 hit, “Waiting On A Star To Fall”, you can totally hear that Whitney Houston sound.

Speaking with Music Radar, the duo talked about what it was like to have written such iconic songs.

“It’s hard to explain the feeling of having written such time-tested hits,” they shared. “Because once a song leaves the studio and goes out into the world, it belongs to the performer and the listeners and fans; and you as songwriter have to let go. If you’re lucky, and we were, it has a life and momentum all its own as it rolls through the world becoming more.”

Dolly Parton

Even though most fans know Parton for iconic songs like “9 To 5” and “Jolene”, the songwriter penned another massive hit when she wrote the Houston song “I Will Always Love You”.

Before it got around to Houston, this one had quite a life of its own. Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” for her old business partner, Porter Wagoner, as a way to say goodbye to working with him and to express love and gratitude for the role he played in her career and life. After that, Parton released her own version, which first caught the attention of Elvis Presley. However, after realizing she would have to sign over half of her publishing rights to Presley, Parton chose to save the song.

“He would have killed it,” she later shared retrospectively. “But anyway, so he didn’t. Then, when Whitney [Houston’s version] came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland.”

David Foster

David Foster, who had his own hits with Olivia Newton-John and the St. Elmo’s Fire soundtrack, also helped pen Houston songs like “If I Have Nothing” and “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength”. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Foster later reflected on watching Houston’s decline in the 90s. This was when she was working on “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength”.

“The voice is a muscle, and you’re always taught to go to the gym and warm up and stretch first before you lift hundred-pound weights. She was lifting hundred-pound weights right out of the gate, and probably did some damage to her voice,” he shared. “But Whitney really, really felt that lyric. You know, would it have been a better record if I had the Whitney from 1992? Yes, for sure. But like everything else she touched, she felt every single note of that song.”

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