I've read that the song was submitted to several artists for consideration. How did it land with Madonna?
LS: I remember Jellybean asking us for a song. We had presented songs to him before. He said, “This girl's on Warner Bros. She needs one more song. Do you guys have one?” So, we presented it to Madonna.
CH: When he heard the song, he was mixing for Prism Records. He had mixed a couple of the records we released as Pure Energy. Wherever we'd see him, he'd say, “I love your sound. You just need that one big record.” So, after Prism didn't want to release it on us, we presented it to him. A lot of friends of ours were telling us it was a hit.
LS: We were in the same rehearsal space as Kool & The Gang. When they heard it, they said the same thing.
CH: We knew that the song had that magic to it. Since we weren't going to be able to record it ourselves, we were really hoping it would fall into the hands of someone who was going to do it justice. Jellybean was shopping it, and I think he pitched it to Phyllis Hyman and a couple of other artists. We didn't pitch the songs that much. I was still hoping we could come around to Pure Energy recording it.
LS: We were throwing it back and forth. We didn't want it to get lost in the shuffle. We weren't sure whether to hold it. We didn't want it to not get the promotion that it deserved. We were torn about that. It was close to our hearts. We had done the complete recording, and wanted it to be our next single.
Curtis, you played on the actual recording of Madonna’s version.Tell me about the sessions.
CH: It was a complete arrangement with vocals, percussion, and everything. We took the demo into the studio and matched the new tracks to it. Fred Zarr played keyboards. My brother, Raymond, played bass. I played guitar. We pretty much did the same things we did on the demo.
LS: Fred added a lick in there, the piano solo at the end of the song. Everything else is exactly like we did it for them to follow; except, I sang all the backgrounds on the demo, and Madonna had the vocalists she was going to use—Norma Jean Wright and Tina Baker.
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