Songfacts®:

• Sass Jordan spent her teen years playing in bands around her home city of Montreal and found some success as the co-lead singer and bass player of the Bowie-inspired act The Pin Ups. But she grew tired of dealing with band dynamics and struck out on her own in the '80s, eventually landing a deal with Atlantic Records. She released her debut album, Tell Somebody, in 1988, and its rowdy title track announced her presence in a big way.
  
  "I think the song itself was pretty cool because it was me saying, 'Hey, it's me. Hey woo-hoo, I'm here! Tell somebody!'" Jordan told Music Life Magazine in 2019. "And I give a lot of credit to my co-writer at the time Bill Beaudoin - he was a catalyst and he was as enthusiastic and dedicated to it as I was. We were like two mad scientists cooking it up and we were in our lab every single day nonstop for about two months during the coldest, darkest Montreal winter."
• The single was released around the time that MuchMusic, Canada's answer to MTV, was shifting to basic cable after spending its first few years as a paid subscription channel. With the music video in hot rotation for a wider audience, Jordan was suddenly thrust into the limelight after years of toiling in relative obscurity.
  
  "It basically made the record go Platinum and made me famous in Canada overnight," she recalled in a 2023 Songfacts interview. "It was eerie."
• The video, directed by Erik Canuel, features Jordan and her band rocking out in the country on the outskirts of Montreal. According to the singer, the budget was tight so they couldn't afford any fancy equipment, so the film crew had to improvise to get some interesting shots. She told Songfacts:
  
  "'Tell Somebody' was a groundbreaker in that the cameraman was using a skateboard for the slide shots, which usually are set up on railings and the camera goes down the rails. It was kind of pioneering in those days. Nobody was doing that - using a skateboard so he could swoop through a shot on a skateboard. It was amazing.
  
  In those days, it was pretty special because it had these kinds of shots you would never have seen in something that was lower budget at the time. It looks a lot more expensive than it actually was. I mean, now we've got drones - there's no comparison."
• Peaking at #11, "Tell Somebody" was the first of Jordan's 10 non-consecutive Top 20 hits on the Canadian chart.
• This earned Jordan a Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1989.
• When the single first rolled out to radio stations, many program directors refused to play it at first because they assumed cover girl Jordan, a blonde bombshell wearing a pink sweater, was a dance-pop artist. Once they were convinced to give it a spin, they were surprised she was a raspy-voiced rocker.
• Jordan thought the album was more like pretty pop music as oppose to the rock she was used to. The singer didn't really get to lean into her style, which was influenced by the aggressive rock she grew up with in the '70s, until her second album, Racine.
  
  She told Rocktopia in 2017: "Racine was way more me, Tell Somebody had a lot of machines on it, that's not really my thing but that was the budget I had at the time and the people I was working with. It's great for what it is, but it's not really the sort of music I love. It went Platinum in Canada so I'm really grateful for that, but I don't really like drum machines and synths."