Songfacts®:

• In the right relationship, you can make the most powerful statement by saying nothing at all. That's the sentiment behind this country ballad written by Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Overstreet, he said Schlitz got the idea in a dream, and they started working on the song during one of their regular writing sessions.
  
  "Did you ever see the old Dick Van Dyke Show? You know how Buddy and Sally and Dick would all be in the room and they'd start brainstorming and throwing ideas around? That's kind of what we do in Nashville," Overstreet explained. "So Don and I were just throwing out ideas. But it was such a fun song to write with the melody."
• Keith Whitley was one of the hottest singers in country music when he released this song on his third album, Don't Close Your Eyes, in 1988. Issued as a single, it was the second in a run of five #1 Country hits for Whitley. Unfortunately, the last of those, "It Ain't Nothin'," was released after his death. On May 9, 1989, Whitley was found dead from alcohol poisoning.
• You'd have a hard time connecting Keith Whitley, a country singer from Kentucky, with Ronan Keating, a boy band member from Dublin, but both landed hits with this song. When Whitley's friends and associates put together a tribute album for him in 1994, Alison Krauss stepped up to record "When You Say Nothing At All," bringing the song back to the charts and giving it some exposure in the UK, where it got the attention of Notting Hill screenwriter Richard Curtis. He loved the song and asked Ronan Keating, a member of the Irish group Boyzone, to record it for the film. Keating agreed, and his version, his first single as a solo artist, took off in Europe, going to #1 in Ireland and the UK.
• According to the song's co-writer Paul Overstreet, when he first heard the Alison Krauss version, "All the hair stood up all over my body."
  
  "I was like, 'Are you kidding me!?' She sang it great," he told Songfacts.