Overview

Image from the music video.

"The Promise Of A New Day" is the second single Paula Abdul's Spellbound album. The song was written by Peter Lord and V. Jeffrey Smith. The single was released to radio on July 20, 1991 while the hit "Rush Rush" was still at the top of radio airplay and the pop charts.

The song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 14, 1991, becoming Abdul's sixth chart-topping single, and her last #1 hit to date.

In an interview with Peter Lord, when asked about Paula’s involvement with the song he said "Paula had an idea for the title and feel for the song and we built it from there."

Monty Whitebloom & Andy Delaney (Big TV!)

The music video was directed by BIG TV! aka Andy Delaney and Monty Whitebloom and produced by Jeremy Barrett for Limelight. The live waterfall and tropical footage was filmed on-location in Hawaii.

Abdul was unable to travel to Hawaii to film her parts of the video due to other commitments and filmed her dance routines and close-ups in front of a green screen on a sound stage in Los Angeles which were then edited into the video.

On the home video release “Captivated ’92 – The Video Collection” documentary, Paula recalled spending an entire day on-set in a pool of freezing cold water and she said she caught a cold shortly after the video shoot wrapped up. Production took place during the week of July 8, 1991.

Behind the scenes of the music video.

The video caused controversy when it originally aired because it appeared that special lenses were used to during filming to make Abdul look taller and thinner than she actually was. It was around this time when problems in Paula's personal life began to cloud her career.

In 1992 she confessed to suffering from the eating disorder bulimia and checked herself into a clinic. Later on an episode of VH1’s Pop Up Video, (and Abdul in a filmed “pop-up” segment) and stated that the clip had been edited in such a way as to make the dancers appear closer together. In that same episode, Abdul admitted that she fell in heels during filming of the dance sequences.

The video was released commercially on VHS and DVD and is also available for download on the U.S. iTunes store.