Give Taylor Dayne a microphone and she oozes passion. It doesn’t matter if she’s belting her ‘80s megahit “Tell It to My Heart,” gushing about Donnie Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block or advocating for early detection procedures for colon and breast cancers.
“Passion is a funny word,” said Dayne, who comes to the Dakota on Sunday. “The passion poured through [my music] because I wanted to share that so much with somebody else if they felt the same way I felt. This urgency, this need to spill out my guts, if you will, I’m always at full tilt.”
At 62, the native New Yorker still has that voice — big, steely and booming. But if you check out her 2024 EP, “Capitol Sessions,” you’ll hear a deeply soulful Dayne as she interprets John Mayer’s “Gravity,” Aretha Franklin’s “Without the One You Love” and Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” among others.
“It’s something else to be on the other side of things and really listen to the lyrics,” she said. “How ‘bout that Aretha song? And ’This Bitter Earth,' omigod. There’s something about it. It was a treasure to spend the time — because of COVID — in the studio with the great [producer] Gregg Field, nine-time Grammy recipient. That album came to be during a very quiet, locked-away time.”
“Gravity” might be part of the repertoire at the Dakota. Dayne, who did a Las Vegas residency in 2023-24, promises a new show, fashioned with new creative and musical directors.
“We’re going back in time, so much of it is the soundtrack of people’s lives, but at the same time where that has led us to now,” she said.
Dayne was a dance-pop queen in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s with such dance-pop smashes as “Tell It to My Heart” and “Prove Your Love” and power ballads like “Love Will Lead You Back” and “I’ll Always Love You.” In her heyday, she acted in TV and film (Warren Beatty told her for the 1994 “Love Affair” remake: “Be you, Taylor. Say the words the way you’d say them”). She later appeared on Broadway in Elton John’s “Aida” and wrote songs for others, including Tina Turner.
In 2020, Dayne dealt with colon cancer.