Songfacts®:

• Turn the lights down, it's time to get romantic in this steamy song by Karyn White. She wrote it with the track's producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. The song was a #1 hit in America, fueled by a smoking MTV video.
• Karyn White charted a total of six Top 40 hits between 1987 and 1991; "Romantic" was her fifth. The album Ritual of Love was certified Gold and her previous self-titled album was certified Platinum. But after the release of her third album, Make Him Do Right, she mysteriously disappeared from the music scene.
  
  While her professional life was flourishing, her private life was rocked by the breakup of her marriage to Terry Lewis and the death of her mother. The grieving singer retreated from the spotlight in the mid-'90s to run an interior design and real estate business near Sacramento, California. As she confided in a 2012 interview with Soul Train to promote her comeback album Carpe Diem, she just took time out to raise her daughter and have a quiet home life.
• This song is a perfect example of the New Jack Swing genre. New Jack Swing kind of fell between the cracks before the rise of hip-hop, but it was a blend of R&B and hip-hop styles, and the techno sound of club dance music. New Jack fell out of vogue about a year later when the smoother R&B sounds of Boyz II Men and TLC began to dominate the charts.
• This was the first song Jam and Lewis wrote with White, whom they met two years earlier while producing Michael Jeffries' self-titled debut album. White recorded the duet "Not Thru Being with You" with the R&B singer, but the sparks really starting flying between her and Lewis. They got married in 1992 but divorced a few years later.
• This was used in two episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1991: "Halloween" and "Leading From The Heart."
• When "Romantic" hit #1, it knocked Mariah Carey's "Emotions" from the top spot.