How we wrote Taylor Dayne’s ‘Tell It To My Heart’ by Seth Swirsky

Seth Swirsky: “I came close to trashing it.”

Though eventually a worldwide success, this 80s classic almost ended up in the bin before becoming a defining pop anthem

As a writer for other artists, Seth Swirsky has penned songs for Al Green, Air Supply, Olivia Newton-John and many more. A master of melody, his ability to come up with instantly memorable hooks is apparent through all of his work, not least on a pair of his songs that were recorded by the American pop star Taylor Dayne. Making the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic, Tell It To Your Heart and Prove Your Love were Dayne’s first two singles and helped her become one of the most popular stars in the US of the late 1980s.

As well as his behind-the-scenes songwriting, Swirsky has put out music with retro-pop band The Red Button and as a solo artist. In 2022, he released the album Songs From The Green Couch. Combining sun-drenched West Coast vibes with classic songwriting, Swirsky’s talent for reeling in catchy hooks remains as strong as ever. Today though, we’re heading back to 1987 to hear about a song that almost didn’t make it…

First published in Songwriting Magazine Winter 2023

Released: 24 July 1987
Artist: Taylor Dayne
Label: Arista
Songwriters: Seth Swirsky, Ernie Gold
Producer: Ric Wake
UK chart position: 3
US chart position: 7

“I was signed to Warner Chappell as a songwriter and we would get things every week saying, ‘Sheena Easton is looking for songs,’ or ‘Air Supply is looking for songs.’ It’s not that easy to get on records, there are a lot of people out there writing for those things. I was a signed writer, so there’s more you’ve got to prove. I would be concentrating on writing for specific artists and I would also just try and write songs without thinking of artists.

“For this particular moment, I was in my apartment in New York and I was thinking of Madonna. She was having so many hits at the time and I was thinking, ‘I’d love to get on the radio, I’d love to have a hit record.’ It also makes you a lot of money. I always went for the top artists, because then if they don’t do it, there’s tiers down of artists like them.

“I’m mostly a guitar player, but I play and write a lot on keyboards. I had this new keyboard that everybody was raving about, a [Yamaha] DX7 and it was, ‘Wow, listen to all these sounds.’ I just got this melody that I liked, and what I did with that song is what I do with every song, and this goes back to Paul McCartney and Yesterday, where it was Scrambled Eggs for a year… I just start singing nonsense lyrics. You don’t know what it is until your mouth starts to form something. Before I knew it, it was, ‘Tell it to my heart.’

“I thought, ‘That actually has meaning for a woman’. Like, ‘Don’t just want to jump my bones, talk to my heart, make me believe it.’ So, that’s how a song gets from the first tier to the second tier, like, ‘I’m onto something right now.’ You throw out your line with bait and you feel a tug. Then, when you reel it in a little bit and it pops its head out, it’s ‘Woah, I got something.’ Once you’re past that second tier, you better reel it in. You can’t say, ‘I’ll write that next week,’ or, ‘I feel like getting an ice cream.’ You’ve got to reel it in right away.

“I was friends with a guy from this band, the guy who I co-wrote the song with, Ernie Gold. He was supposed to come over that day. I said, ‘I got this thing,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, that sounds really cool,’ and he added a bridge part to it.

“When I was writing Tell It To My Heart, I didn’t have all the lyrics done. I didn’t even have the beginning lyrics. I took a train from New York City to my parents’ house in Great Neck on Long Island, where I grew up, and I went into my old room. All the same posters were up in my room and the same funny green chair. I was sitting there with a pad thinking, ‘I don’t know what I want to say about the song,’ and then the lyric just happened. ‘I feel the night explode when we’re together…’ I don’t think that I crossed out a single word. Those lyrics flowed out.

“Then, out of the blue, we demoed it with an ex-girlfriend of mine who is a really powerful singer. The demo was pretty good and then somehow it got in the hands of this artist in Canada named Louisa Florio. I didn’t know it, but my company had also already pitched the song around and this girl named Leslie Wunderman [Taylor Dayne’s birth name] was looking for a song to start her career.

“She knew somebody who knew somebody at the place that I was writing songs for. They pitched the song to her, Ric Wake did his production on it and he calls me up, ‘You wrote this song and I want you to hear what we did on it to see if you approve.’ No record deal at the time. I knew in the back of my head that Louisa Florio had done the song in Canada. I had to keep that from him. It hadn’t come out yet but I didn’t want to ruin a thing as well.

“There’s one other thing… when the demo was made of the song, I was in my apartment and I played it for the first time for my girlfriend and we both said, ‘I don’t know if it’s good enough to deliver.’ I had to write 12 songs a year. I came close to trashing it and saying it’s not good enough. When you’re young, you want to impress the people in the New York office, the London office… in LA. They’re bigger than you. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m a writer and I hope they like my songs.’ I was this close to saying, ‘It’s not good enough, I’m gonna trash it.’ But I thought to myself, ‘You know what, deliver everything. You never know.’ I’d already had a gold record from Air Supply; they did my first song. So I had a little bit of confidence, but not overwhelming confidence.

“So Ric Wake, the producer, calls me and he played it, and all it had was keyboards and drums. It really had no bass track; it was so sparse. I just thought, ‘Wow, this is the first time I’m hearing one of my songs that the demo isn’t better than how the producer did it.’ I’ve had many songs done where they reinterpret your song and it just doesn’t have that thing in it, but I thought, ‘This is fantastic.’ They got a record deal on Arista Records, and within the month, it went crazy and was playing on MTV.

Seth Swirsky: “I’m not going to rewrite history and tell you I wanted to write an anthem. I don’t even think it’s an anthem.”

“One other funny little story that no one knows. That same girlfriend and I, I hear my buzzer and she goes, ‘You’re not ready? We’re supposed to go to San Francisco today!’ We were living in New York, we had a vacation planned to go to San Francisco. We were both 26. I hadn’t showered, I’d overslept. I get it all together, we get on a plane, we land in San Francisco. I’m crazy tired. We rent a car and I turn on the radio as we’re driving to our hotel. ‘Tell it to my heart…’ it was the first time I ever heard my song on the radio.

“This was the same girlfriend that we’d both decided I shouldn’t deliver the song. It was so shocking to hear my song on the radio, because I didn’t really believe that I could have a hit. Just like I didn’t really believe until I saw my name on an Air Supply record where it said ‘Seth Swirsky’ on it and I had to get a magnifying glass and look again, to make sure. It was so shocking. Because I wasn’t far removed from being in my room, listening to all those bands with my headphones.

“People sometimes think it’s a dance song, I never saw Tell It To My Heart as a dance song. I see it as a pop song. I came up through pop music – ‘pop’ meaning popular, melodic, two to three minutes and you want to sing it. This song had a lot of melody to it and I also think that it had a good message for women. I wasn’t thinking that when I wrote it. It must have been in me to want to say something about that or make a comment on that. I’m not going to rewrite history and tell you I wanted to write an anthem. I don’t even think it’s an anthem. But I do think it was popular because of the melody and to me, that’s pop music.

“I just love when I’m walking, or I’m at a pizza place and they have speakers, and that song comes on and I see people mouthing the words. I go to YouTube sometimes and I’ll see the official video and see these young people say, ‘God, I wish I was born in the 80s,’ or, ‘My mum played this song,’ or, ‘I heard this in that movie.’ I love seeing people’s reactions, even to this day, 35 years later.”

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