1988 · Behind the Songs
“A mother-daughter duet borrowed from a musical about chess.”
The sixth and final single from Whitney Houston’s second album, Whitney, was an unusual choice on every level. Released on November 30, 1988, “I Know Him So Well” came out only in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. It had no official video and lighter promotion than the singles before it — a quiet farewell to a blockbuster album.
The song began far from Houston, in the concept musical Chess by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson, and Björn Ulvaeus. In the show it is sung by two women — Svetlana, the ex-wife of a Russian chess champion, and Florence, his lover — comparing notes on the same man. Its chorus grew out of “I Am an A,” a number ABBA performed on their 1977 tour but never officially released, which circulated afterward on bootlegs.
Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson made the original famous: their single, from the double album Chess of autumn 1984, was released in December 1984 and spent four weeks at number one in Britain in 1985. The two singers recorded their vocals separately and never met during the sessions, yet the record became the best-selling British single by a female duo, a Guinness record, and in 2011 the Official Charts ranked it seventh among the best-selling duets of all time.
Houston recorded her version with her mother, Cissy Houston, during the 1986–87 sessions for Whitney, with Narada Michael Walden producing for Arista. The studio band tells its own story: Walden on acoustic drums, Walter Afanasieff on Kurzweil, DX7, and Super Jupiter, Preston Glass on DX7, Cory Lerios on synthesizer, Randy Jackson on electric bass, Corrado Rustici on synth guitar, and Michael Gibbs arranging and conducting the strings.
Critics split — Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times praised it, while Rolling Stone’s Vince Aletti did not — and the charts were modest: number 16 on the Dutch Single Top 100 (number 14 on the Dutch Top 40), number 46 in Germany, and number 19 in Belgium. But the record’s real subject was never the charts. It was a mother and daughter singing a song about two women who finally understand each other.