Songfacts®:

• Bad English was a supergroup comprised of lead singer John Waite, keyboard player Jonathan Cain, bass player Ricky Phillips, guitarist Neal Schon and drummer Deen Castronovo. Waite, Cain and Phillips had been in a popular British band called the Babys, while Schon, Castronovo and Cain were in Journey (Cain was in both groups). It was quite an assemblage of musical talent, and between them they wrote 11 of the 13 songs on their self-titled debut album. "When I See You Smile" wasn't one of them.
  
  The song was written by Diane Warren, who had a knack for supplying popular rock musicians with pop hits: she wrote "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" for Starship, "Who Will You Run To" for Heart, and "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" for Aerosmith. She had also written the song "Don't Lose Any Sleep," which appeared on Waite's 1987 solo album Rover's Return.
  
  The band was signed to Epic Records, whose A&R man Don Grierson implored them to record a hit. They liked him, so when he suggested "When I See You Smile," the band agreed to record it, since they knew it would supply Grierson with his hit.
• This is by far the biggest hit for Bad English, but it's not their only one. Their first single was "Forget Me Not," which made #45 in the US. "When I See You Smile" was their next release, and "Price of Love" came next, charting at #5. They released one more album (Backlash, 1991) before terminating the project. In our John Waite interview, he explained: "It was fun for a year. And then people reverted to type. I think the Journey guys wanted to be back in Journey and I wanted to be back solo. We had a very valiant attempt at making a second record, but we weren't given enough time to write it. We tried, and we almost made it."
• Diane Warren wrote "When I See You Smile" as a tribute to her father, who was the one person that always believed in her and supported her songwriting. At first, she didn't think it was anything special, but after publishers and contacts reacted positively, she tried to place it with Capitol Records for the Canadian band Sheriff, whose ballad "When I'm With You" had just gone to #1.
  
  Sheriff were already lining up their own follow-up ballad ("More Than Words Can Say"), so Warren's publisher pulled "When I See You Smile" and placed it with Bad English instead.
• Over time, the song's comforting lyric has made it a popular choice at weddings, sometimes even for father-daughter dances.