Starship – Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now

Diane Warren’s First Number One Was About A Guy And A Mannequin

When Starship released “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” in January 1987 as the theme to the romantic comedy Mannequin, nobody expected it to become one of the year’s biggest hits. The power ballad duet featuring Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks starting April 4, 1987, giving songwriter Diane Warren her first number one single. The song dominated internationally, spending four weeks at number one in the UK where it became the second best-selling single of 1987 behind only Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. It also hit number one in Canada, Ireland, and Portugal, and reached the top five across Germany, Australia, Sweden, and Switzerland. The single earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song but lost to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing.

The song’s origin story is more personal than anyone watching the film would guess. Director Michael Gottlieb commissioned songwriters Albert Hammond and Diane Warren to write a song for the wedding scene and sent them the script. Hammond was going through something remarkably similar in his own life. He’d been living with his girlfriend Claudia for seven years and had finally gotten his divorce from his first marriage finalized. In a 1992 BBC Radio interview, Hammond explained what he told Warren during their writing session. After seven years of legal obstacles, he felt like people had been trying to stop him from marrying Claudia, but they hadn’t succeeded and nothing was going to stop him now. That conversation sparked the title and the entire concept. Years later, Warren would joke about the absurdity of writing her first number one hit for a movie about someone falling in love with a mannequin, but at the time she and Hammond were focused on the universal feeling behind the quirky premise.

Producer Narada Michael Walden crafted the recording at his Tarpan Studios in San Rafael, California, bringing his signature high-gloss production style that had already shaped hits for Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin. The track featured electronic drums, shimmering keyboards, and layered guitars creating a wall of sound behind the vocals. Mickey Thomas led with his earnest tenor while Grace Slick joined for the chorus and bridge with her distinctive rasp, creating a duet that balanced emotional sincerity with commercial appeal. At forty-seven years old, Slick became the oldest woman to have a number one single in the United States, a record that stood until Cher’s “Believe” broke it in 1999. Walden won Producer of the Year at the 1987 Grammy Awards, partly for his work on this track.

The song appeared on Starship’s second studio album No Protection, released in July 1987 through Grunt Records and RCA Records. The album marked a continuation of the slick pop-rock sound that had made their previous single “We Built This City” so controversial among rock critics but so successful commercially. No Protection didn’t produce any other major hits beyond “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, which made the single’s success even more crucial to the album’s overall performance. The band was in transition, with founding Jefferson Airplane members long gone and the Starship name representing something entirely different from the psychedelic San Francisco sound that had launched the original group nearly two decades earlier.

The music video became essential to the song’s success, arriving at MTV during a pivotal cultural moment. The network had faced criticism from artists like David Bowie for playing almost exclusively white artists, but Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” had proven the commercial viability of black artists. When Starship’s video arrived, MTV was actively seeking more diverse content. The clip cleverly mirrored the film’s premise, with clips from Mannequin intercut with shots of the band recreating scenes, including Grace Slick as a mannequin coming to life. The video helped push the single to massive international success.

The song has maintained remarkable cultural staying power. Albert Hammond recorded his own versions three times over the years, including a 2010 duet with Bonnie Tyler. In 2013, it returned to the UK charts after appearing in a TalkTalk television advertising campaign. The track was featured in films including The Skeleton Twins and most recently served as the trailer and end credits song for the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thunderbolts in 2025. For Diane Warren, this was just the beginning of an extraordinary career that would bring her fifteen more Academy Award nominations by 2024, making her the most-nominated woman in any category in Oscar history without winning. For anyone exploring eighties power ballads or discovering how movie songs became cultural touchstones, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” remains essential listening. It’s a song that transformed a silly movie premise into something genuinely uplifting, proving that the best pop songs can find universal truth in the most unlikely places.