Songoftheday 1/24/15 - Come on baby dry your eyes wipe your tears, never liked to see you cry won't you please forgive me...

"Human" - The Human League
from the album Crash! (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 15

Today's Song of the Day comes from the new wave band that brought the first salvo in the "second British Invasion", the Human League. They successfully avoided the follow-up slump with their 1983 Fascination EP, which spun out two more hits in America with the top-ten title track and top-40 follow-up "Mirror Man". However, even though their next proper album Hysteria saw them growing musically with meatier lyrics and more organic instrumentation, it failed to continue the success in America and to a lesser extent England, with three singles making the top-20 in the UK and only one of them, the stellar "The Lebanon", stalling out at #64 in the US.

Hoping for their investment to regain momentum, their label sent the band to work with the red-hot production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the "Flyte Tyme" crew responsible for Janet Jackson's Control album. But instead of them collaborating on a rework of the Human League sound, Jimmy and Terry basically wrote up another Control album to plug the act into. With the pair doing almost all of the non-vocal work, leaving the trio of lead singer Philip Oakey and backups Joanne Catherall and Sue Sulley on a "whiter" version of a post-funk album, Crash was as much a hodgepodge as the eventual movie bearing the same name. The thing is, within that mess was a stunner that turned out to be one of the group's best ever moments, the ballad "Human". With the act leaving the pair dishearteningly to complete the production on their own (and keyboardist Ian Wright quitting the band altogether), Lewis and Jam crafted a record that transcended anything they could have expected...

"Human" became the Human League's second #1 pop hit in the States in November of 1986. The record also crossed over to reach #3 on both the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") and surprisingly on the R&B charts in Billboard magazine. The 12" extended version of the track topped the Dance Club Play list in the mag as well. Internationally, the record reached #8 in their native Britain, top ten in Germany, Ireland, and New Zealand, and #1 in Canada, and gave their career the boost it really needed.

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Here's the club version that topped the dance chart in 1986...

In 1997, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis reprised "Human" with R&B hitmakers Boyz II Men as "Human II - Don't Turn Your Back On Me"...

A year later, British "boyband" Five interpolated the original for their debut album...

Another British performer, singer Craig David, released "Human" as the flip side of his top-3 UK hit "Walking Away" in 2001.

In 2003, the "League" released a "Chinese Whispers" remix of the track including Asian instrumentation and background vocals...

Openly gay singer Ari Gold sampled "Human" and was quite successful, reaching #22 on the Dance Club chart in Billboard in 2009...

Finally, here's the Human League live in 2003 with the song...

Up tomorrow: A former NYPD-man needs a lift, finds one with Phil Spector's muse.