Songfacts®:

• In this country ballad, Reba McEntire and Vince Gill portray old flames who try to deny they still have feelings for each other. The ruse falls apart when they meet again because "the heart won't lie."
• The story of this song goes back to Kenny Rogers, who asked Kim Carnes to write a duet for them to sing together in the vein of their earlier collaborations, particularly "Don't Fall In Love With A Dreamer" (1980). Carnes teamed up with Donna Terry Weiss - who co-wrote Jackie DeShannon's "Bette Davis Eyes," which Carnes popularized in 1981 - to write "The Heart Won't Lie." It started out as a kind of sequel to "Dreamer," which wasn't typical of Carnes' songwriting method.
  
  "I usually don't do that," she told Rolling Stone Country in 2015. "I usually sit down and write from inspiration. But once I decided to do that, it did become inspiration. I wrote the chorus and called Donna Weiss up and said, 'This is perfect for the two of us.' [Producer] Jimmy Bowen paid us the best compliment. He said that when he hears a song we wrote together, it's like one person wrote it. So Donna and I wrote it, made a demo of it and sent it to Kenny. He loved it and said, 'Let's do it as a duet on my next album.'"
  
  But Rogers didn't get around to recording the ballad with Carnes. His next album, Something Inside So Strong already featured a duet with Gladys Knight ("If I Knew Then What I Know Now"), among others, so he decided to wait. He tried to cut it with McEntire later - which thrilled Carnes because "Reba was hot as a pistol" - but it surprisingly fell flat.
  
  McEntire told About.com: "We could never get it to sound just right because of the different ranges of our voices."
  
  But McEntire never forgot about the ballad. When she started putting together her 18th studio album, It's Your Call, she asked Rogers if she could sing it solo and brought on Vince Gill, her partner on 1990's "Oklahoma Swing," to perform the background harmonies. When her co-producer, Tony Brown, suggested Gill should have a bigger role on the track, she agreed to do it as a duet.
• This was McEntire's 17th #1 hit on the Country chart. Gill had hit the apex twice prior to the single's 1993 release. He followed with a pair of solo chart-toppers later that year: "One More Last Chance" and "Tryin' To Get Over You."
• For the music video, director Jon Small took inspiration from the 1982 romantic drama An Officer And A Gentleman, with McEntire playing the role of a US Navy Officer Navy Candidate who undergoes rigorous training at the hands of her tough Marine Corps Drill Instructor. Unlike Richard Gere's character in the movie, McEntire falls for the sergeant.
  
  The video was filmed over four days at the Nashville Armed Forces Recruiting Station, which was a nightmare for Gill, in particular, but he made the best of it.
  
  "He doesn't really care for videos and this one turned into a four-day shoot," McEntire explained. "It was great to spend time with Vince and get to watch him do what he called his Gomer Pyle imitation for his character. But I had to promise him that if he ever does another song with me, he will never have to suffer through a four-day video shoot again!"
• McEntire and Gill sang this on the sitcom Evening Shade when they played themselves in the 1993 episode "Ava Takes A Shower: Part 2."
• The duo reunited to perform this for the 1994 NBC special Hot Country Jam '94.
• This was nominated for Vocal Event of the Year at the 1993 Country Music Association Awards.
• It's Your Call was McEntire's first Top 10 entry on the genre-spanning Billboard 200 albums chart, where it peaked at #8. It was also her fifth album to reach #1 on the Country Albums chart.