Talk about strange bedfellows, but Aerosmith have Barbra Streisand and her husband, actor James Brolin, to thank for their 1998 hit, "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing."
She writes about it in her just published memoir, My Name Is Barbra, saying that one night in bed Brolin said, "I don't want to fall asleep." When she asked why, he said, "'cause I'll miss you."
"What a beautiful, poetic thing to say," she writes. "And it captured a moment of complete bliss… physical, emotional, spiritual."
As for how it inspired the song, Barbra told that story to Barbara Walters on ABC in 1997 and Diane Warren, who wrote the song, was watching.
"I wrote down the title," says Warren said. "I didn’t write the song [then], but I just thought, ‘I don’t want to miss a thing.’ That’s just a cool title, you know."
Fast forward to 1998 and she was asked to contribute supply a song to the Armageddon soundtrack and she began with the title because "it was about the end of the world, and what would you say to somebody if you didn't have that much time left? I wanted that urgency, and so I wrote the song, never knowing Aerosmith was going to do it. That was amazing."
And Barbra agrees, writing, "It was so gratifying to see so many people responding to Jim's words... Well, no wonder… so did I!"
And that response earned Aerosmith their only number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also a Top 10 hit in 28 other countries.