Songoftheday 3/7/15 - Baby sneezes, Mummy pleases, Daddy breezes in...

"Coming Around Again" - Carly Simon
from the album Coming Around Again (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #18 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's Song of the Day comes from singer/songwriter Carly Simon, who was one of the brightest stars of 70's pop music. After getting her start performing with her sister Lucy, Simon released her debut solo album in 1971. She found success out of the box with her first single, "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Would Be", which made the pop top-10 in the U.S. Her second album Anticipation saw the title track not only make the top-3 on the easy-listening chart, but be indelibly linked to those Heinz ketchup commercials.

Carly started 1973 with her biggest hit, the #1 pop and adult contemporary hit "You're So Vain", which ever since has people guessing the name of the person she's supposedly singing to. She topped the AC chart a second time in 1977 with her song from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, "Nobody Does It Better". However, after another top-10 hit (her last so far) with the Michael McDonald-assisted "You Belong To Me", disco overshadowed the singer/songwriter genre, and she went six years in the early 80s without a top-40 pop hit.

In 1987 Carly released her thirteenth studio album Coming Around Again. her first for Clive Davis' Arista Records, and the title track was featured in the Meryl Streep/Jack Nicholson romantic comedy Heartburn. The single became her first big radio hit since 1980. Most importantly, it was a good opening salvo for mature artists to have their moment again on mainstream radio, with a theme a regaining the will to love again something missing from the twee new wave and dance of the day...

"Coming Around Again" landed in the American pop top 20 in January of 1987, her most recent as a lead artist. The single went to #5 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart in Billboard, one of four top-10 AC hits from the Coming Around Again album. Internationally, the record went to #10 in England and #5 in Ireland, and was a top-40 hit in both Canada and Australia. The album was nominated for a Grammy for Pop Female Vocal Performance in 1988. losing to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)".

In 1989, another movie, Working Girl, would promote another Carly Simon track, "Let The River Run", which would peak at the halfway point on the Hot 100, and nab an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy for her. She started the 90s with a top-5 adult contemporary hit with "Better Not Tell Her" that missed the Hot 100 completely. Simon would return to the top-40 courtesy of Janet Jackson, who sampled "You're So Vain" for "Son Of A Gun (Betcha Think This Song Is About You)", which peaked at #28 with a featured credit for Carly. Most recently, Carly climbed into the easy-listening top-10 in 2005 with her version of "Let It Snow"...

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Here's Carly in concert in 1987 promoting the album...

Up tomorrow: a minor hit from 1981 gets a redo thanks to a Mr. Alex P. Keaton.