999,827: Boy Meets Girl - Waiting For a Star to Fall

There was once a time, not so long ago, when grown-ups could consciously decide to form a pop group, for the purpose of scoring pop hits on the pop charts. People could do this without having to be celebrities already, or otherwise constructing a defined public image for the media to eat up (though, of course, that never hurt in the MTV era). With a professionally developed sense of melody, you could find yourself all over radio, landing in the Billboard Top Ten, and thoroughly permeating the popular consciousness, despite your relative personal anonymity. Critics often lambasted music they couldn’t identify as the product of a personal artistic vision, but critics weaned on rock in the ‘60s or punk in the ‘70s often seemed to expect every goddamn record to change the fucking world or it wasn’t worth anyone’s while.

Boy Meets Girl were a husband-and-wife songwriting duo who got their start penning Whitney Houston’s two best songs, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “How Will I Know.” For their own material, George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam adopted a suitably generic name that alluded in vague terms to their own real-life coupling. So much the stuff of romantic songs and long-distance dedications, they even MET at a wedding! Unlike many such hookups, however, they continued to date long after the wedding atmosphere (“Love and romance are in the air!” mixed with “Oh God, I’m so alone!” mixed with “Shit hell, I’m drunk!”) had faded.

Boy Meets Girl’s lone hit was the Top Fiver “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” an effortlessly catchy amalgam of light dance-pop and late-‘80s adult contemporary. The song kicks off with that typical, awkward ‘80s juxtaposition of a real live saxophone with an almost completely synthesized backing track. The lyrics are standard-issue romantic longing, and if you don’t remember this song by its title, you may well have thought it was called “In My Arms Baby Yeah” if you ever listened to a pop radio station or attended a junior high school dance in the late ‘80s. For my money, the highlight is that hallmark of the lost art of professional songwriting, an absolutely killer bridge (around 2:45 in) that’s every bit as memorable as the chorus (and also proves that George and Shannon don’t sound all that different from one another).

The downside of lacking a marketable image or soap-opera private life is that you sink or swim on your ability to keep coming up with great melodies. And if you run out of those, well, thanks for playing. Boy Meets Girl just seemed like nice people making nice music, and they joined hair metal in getting fucking obliterated by Nirvana. Alas, when their career ended, their romantic partnership went the way of the creative one, proving yet again that popular love songs are a cruel prank on the American psyche.

Waiting For A Star To Fall - B...