Songfacts®:

• This was written by songwriter and American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi and former Eurythmic Dave Stewart. The record label impresario Jimmy Iovine put them together to write for the Pussycat Dolls, but DioGuardi and Stewart quickly realized that the music they were writing was best suited for them to record together. Iovine agreed and signed them to Interscope Records where they recorded an album as Platinum Weird. The album was never released, but with Iovine's help, Stewart and DioGuardi created a fake documentary of the band that ran on VH1 and YouTube, with appearances by Mick Jagger, Elton John, Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Stevie Nicks, Ringo Starr and Bob Geldof talking about the influence of Platinum Weird and telling a fabricated story about the duo.
• In The Dave Stewart Songbook, Stewart explains that he and DioGuardi wrote this in about 10 minutes one afternoon when movers were bringing furniture into her new Los Angeles home. Writes Stewart: "I could hear some windchimes just outside the open window where I was laying, so I picked up an acoustic guitar and was trying to play the same random pattern the chimes were making. Kara is a genius with melody and multitasking so as she's shouting to the movers she starts singing, 'Don't know much about your life,' much to the confusion of the workers. It was like a scene from a musical as the furniture was piling in, she was singing, 'What do you say to taking chances? What do you you say to jumping off the edge?' We literally were swapping lyrics, melodies and chords in real time while all this chaos was around us. The song was written about ourselves trusting and baring our souls to each other. About committing to making something special even though we knew we were this odd couple who had no other reason to do it other than we loved it."
• The line, "So talk to me, like lovers do" came from the Eurythmics song "Here Comes The Rain Again." In our interview with Dave Stewart, he explained why he recycled the lyric: "Yeah, because Taking Chances is the same, me writing with Kara DioGuardi and deciding to enter into something together. So 'I don't know much about your life, don't know much about your world, but I don't want to be alone tonight on this planet they call Earth, right? So what do you say of taking chances?' And it builds up and builds up and gets more determined, which is Kara's personality, who's been through a lot, and she goes, you know, 'I've been beaten down' and all this kind of stuff. And then it flips into, 'So talk to me, talk to me like lovers do.' It's like pulling itself out of that, getting the strength, and actually nodding and tipping my hat to one of my own songs within the song."
• After DioGuardi and Stewart recorded the song, they played it for Dion's husband René, who loved it. Dion released it as the title track and first single from her album, which was also the name of her World Tour.
• John Shanks, who was producer of Kelly Clarkson's album Breakaway, produced both Dion's version and the Platinum Weird version of this song.
• Stewart appears in the video for this song, where he gets a speaking role: that's him at the beginning talking to Dion, and also at the end with the motorcycle stopping in front of him.