Songfacts®:

• A private emotion is one so intimate, others can't detect it unless you want them to. In this song, Ricky Martin asks his lover to open up and share that private emotion with him, promising he'll be there for support and understanding.
• "Private Emotion" was written by Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian, and released by their band The Hooters on their 1993 album Out Of Body. The group had some hits in the '80s, including "And We Danced" and "All You Zombies." They also worked on Cyndi Lauper's debut album, She's So Unusual - Hyman wrote "Time After Time" with Lauper.
  
  Their hits dried up in the '90s and when they released "Private Emotion" as a single, it went nowhere. They knew it was a great song so they shopped it to other artists through Desmond Child, who was producing many top acts, including Ricky Martin. Eric Bazilian told Songfacts how it came to be. "Desmond already had the song in his head and told me he wanted to cut it with Ricky Martin," he said. "So I recut the track, I actually cut most of the track here in my home studio and sent it to Desmond in Miami. I recreated my mandolin parts and a lot of that sort of thing. I ended up being pretty involved in the project. I played a lot of guitars on that record. Ricky was one of the nicest people I've ever met."
• This was the fourth and final single from Martin's fifth album, his first primarily in English. Martin broke out in America with a scintillating performance at the 1999 Grammy Awards that February. That May, the album's first single, "Livin' La Vida Loca," went to #1. It was followed by "She's All I Ever Had," "Shake Your Bon-Bon," and finally "Private Emotion," which peaked at #67 in March 2000, over a year after the Grammy performance.
• The song is a duet with the Swedish singer Meja, who also appears in the video.
• Francis Lawrence directed the music video, which stars the French model Aurélie Claudel as Martin's love interest. At the beginning of the video, they're both frozen in ice, but gradually the ice melts and they come together.
• For the Middle Eastern and Asian versions of the album, the song was re-recorded with Turkish singer Sertab Erener singing the parts originally sung by Meja.