Songoftheday 5/19/18 - Girl you're such a bad thing standing there all alone, looking so good to me baby can't do no wrong...
from the album Back To Front (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #21 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9
Today's song of the day comes from pop/soul singer/songwriter Lionel Richie, whose third solo album after leaving the Commodores, Dancing On The Ceiling, had spun off five top-20 hits in the U.S. with "Se La", "Ballerina Girl", "Love Will Conquer All", "Dancing On The Ceiling", and his #1 smash "Say You, Say Me". Between the five singles he racked up 57 weeks in the top-40. After such a heavily-productive decade in the 1980s, it was a surprise that it took six years from the release of Dancing On The Ceiling for Lionel to release a new album, and in this case it was a retrospective of his career with only three unreleased tracks on it. Spanning her work with the Commodores and solo, it was meant perhaps to reintroduce Richie for the new decade, with the introduction of the lead single from the set, the adult-contemporary gem "Do It To Me". Written by Lionel, who produced it with Stewart Levine (Simply Red), the song brought him back to the heights with urban radio stations...
"Do It To Me" climbed to the American pop Top-40 in June of 1992. The single spent one week at #1 on Billboard's R&B chart, has fifth and so-far last soul charttopper outside of the Commodores. The track also spent four weeks at #3 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio tally. Internationally, the single did better than in the U.S. in some parts, reaching the top ten in Canada (#6), France (#6) and Norway (#7), and hit the top-40 in the Belgium (#11), Netherlands (#12), Switzerland (#12), Austria (#23), Germany (#26), Ireland (#28), New Zealand (#29), and the UK (#33).
The second release from Back To Front, the smooth uptempo pop of "My Destiny", missed the pop Hot 100 here in the States, but reached #7 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #56 R&B. The song topped the singles chart in the Netherlands, and made the top ten in the UK (#7) and Ireland (#10), and placed in the Top-40 in France (#18), Switzerland (#19), Austria (#22), Germany (#23), and New Zealand (#38). The third new track from the compilation, the ballad "Love, Oh Love", went top-40 in Belgium (#13), the Netherlands (#15), and Ireland (#25).
Up tomorrow: New waver needs some elevation.
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