Dan Shea and Robin Thicke wrote the first song on MARC ANTHONY, WHEN I DREAM AT NIGHT. Its chorus begins "'Cause I only feel alive/ When I dream at night/ Even though she's not real it's all right." "It's sort of a custom-made love song," MARC ANTHONY says. "The three of us were talking about subjects for songs, and I told them a story I was going through. 'There's a situation,' I said, 'There's this girl in my dreams that I see all the time.'"

MARC ANTHONY feels disinclined to choose his favorite among the songs on the record—"They're all like my kids," he says--but he is especially fond of two of them, AM I THE ONLY ONE and MY BABY YOU. "As far as painting a picture," he says, "the first song lyrically that I'm proudest of is AM I THE ONLY ONE. I tried to capture loneliness between this couple that have gone wrong and aren't exactly sure why. MAY BABY YOU is written for my daughter, Arianna, who is six. I wrote it so that she could understand it. It's a daddy professing his love."

MARC ANTHONY is thirty-one. Born in New York's Spanish Harlem, he was given the name MARCO ANTONIO MUÑIZ by his father, Felipe, a musician, for a famous Mexican singer and became MARC ANTHONY to avoid becoming confused with the older man. As recently as six years ago, MARC ANTHONY was singing in English in dance clubs in New York City. A respectable audience was a hundred people. He specialized in a tersely minimal form of dance music called house music, in which a singer repeats a phrase over and over, with slight variations, to the accompaniment of a rhythm track recorded on a DAT. He also frequently sang background on records with a band called the Latin Rascals, who worked with a producer called Little Louis Vega. When Vega received a contract from Atlantic Records, in 1991, he asked MARC ANTHONY to be his singer. None of their records was especially successful, but one of them, REBEL, was a hit in the clubs. It occasionally still turns up in second-hand record stores in Manhattan.

In 1992, the Latin percussionist and bandleader Tito Puente asked Vega and MARC ANTHONY to open his revue at Madison Square Garden. After singing before such an enormous crowd, MARC ANTHONY lost his appetite for appearing in clubs. His manager suggested that he sing in Spanish but he wasn't interested. When he was a small boy, his father would invite musicians to the family's apartment on Saturday nights and they would set up in the kitchen and play half the night. MARC ANTHONY'S father would put him on the table to sing. "I had two sets," MARC ANTHONY says. "Six and eight." His repertoire consisted of a single song, "El Zorzal," about a kind of bird that lives in Puerto Rico. "He had only that one song," his father says, "but he could belt it."

Growing up, MARC ANTHONY listened mostly to rhythm & blues and to rock. Several months into his hiatus, he was driving in a car in Manhattan and he heard a song on the radio by a singer named Juan Gabriel. "It was called 'Hasta que te conocí,'" MARC ANTHONY says, "which means, 'Until I Met You,' and it ripped me apart. I don't know why and I don't want to know why. I called my manager and asked if I could record this in salsa."

Acclaim arrived so suddenly in MARC ANTHONY'S life that he describes its appearance by saying, "I saw my old life shattered." In 1993, he recorded the song he'd heard in the car. His manager then sent him to perform at a Latin music convention called Radio y Música. MARC ANTHONY brought with him a DAT that contained the song's musical tracks. He was living at the time on so little money that the clothes he performed in were borrowed. In the audience were mainly disc jockeys. When he took the stage one person clapped. His hand on the microphone trembled. He closed his eyes and thought, 'Make believe you're singing in your living room to your mom,' and when he finished he left the stage so quickly that his manager had to grab him and point out that he was receiving a standing ovation. Several of the disc jockeys were dialing their cell phones. "Find this kid's CD," he heard one of them say. "I threw it out this morning--it's in the trash. Find it and play it!" Later that day, he appeared on a television show called "Carnival Internacional," which is broadcast all over the world. "That changed my life forever," he says. "I mean in one day. It seemed like years before I was ever in New York again. I was booked and booked and booked--Panama, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Miami, and Los Angeles. I woke up once in the middle of the night in a hotel and didn't know where I was. I called my brother's room and said, 'Where are we?' He said, 'Look out the window.' All I could see was a city at night, Tokyo. I thought, 'How did this happen?'"