Donny Osmond can still place the moment. “Back in ’83, which is just, I think, around the time Thriller came out,” he told comedian Adam Carolla in 2023. Michael’s album was the biggest in America that year. Donny, a teen idol in the early 1970s, couldn’t get a song on the charts. So he took his problem to the one friend who’d lived the same life and asked him straight out: “Mike, how do I get back on the charts?”
He had good reason to trust Michael with it. Both boys started out in family bands and grew into solo teen idols. “There’s nine children in each family,” Donny said in the 2024 MTV documentary “Larger than Life: Reign of the Boybands.” “Mike and I are both the seventh child of nine.” He also remembers Michael telling him one day, “Donny, you’re the only person on this planet that knows what my childhood was like.”
By the early 1980s, though, their paths had split. Donny doesn’t dress up how bad it got. “The name Donny Osmond was a joke, years ago,” he told Carolla. “I mean, if you said you like Donny Osmond music, you were ousted.”
Michael gave him the truth anyway. “He said, ‘Your name’s poison, Donny. You gotta change your name,'” Donny recalled.
He can laugh about it now, but it hurt. “It was very offensive. It was tough to hear that,” he said. Then he added: “But he was right, because in ’89, radio stations all across the country played my music, but didn’t say my name.”
Donny tells the story on The Adam Carolla Show
This is the full 2023 episode. Donny gets to Michael’s advice at about 7:02, and around 7:40 the talk turns to why people heard his name and thought of his teen hit “Puppy Love.”
The proof came five years later. In 1988 Donny recorded “Soldier of Love.” It made the Top 30 in Britain, but he had no record deal in America, so the song wasn’t released there. Then a fan sent a British import to WPLJ, ABC’s FM station in New York. Jessica Ettinger, the station’s acting program director, loved it.
She put it on the air without saying who was singing. She called it a “mystery artist” and kept listeners guessing for several weeks. “They played the record to test it because they liked the song, but they just didn’t want to say my name,” Donny told Carolla.
It worked. Capitol Records signed him and copied Ettinger’s idea at stations around the country. In 1989 “Soldier of Love” climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. “And they did me a favor by not saying who I was, and it became a hit,” Donny said. “Then they found out it was me.”
Donny Osmond’s “Soldier of Love”
This is the song itself, on Donny’s own YouTube channel: the 1988 single that radio played for weeks without saying who was singing it.
Donny never did change his name. When WPLJ finally let its DJs tell New York who the mystery singer was, Donny Osmond came on the air live.