Songoftheday 8/10/20 - The function's on around midnight, what time is it are you inside?

  "Let's Get Down" / "Thinking of You" - Tony! Toni! Toné!

from the album House Of Music (1996)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #22 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 8

 

Today's song(s) of the day come from the R&B trio Tony! Toni! Toné!, whose third album Sons Of Soul was the most popular of their career, selling over two million copies and spinning off three top-40 pop/top-10 R&B hits with "If I Had No Loot", "Anniversary", and "(Lay Your Head On My) Pillow". The group - Raphael Saadiq, D'Wayne Wiggins, and Tim Christian Riley - took a two year break, where they wrote and produced for other artist, and Raphael had a solo hit of his own in the spring of 1995 with "Ask of You" from the movie Higher Learning. A year later, the three men reunited for their fourth and what would be their final studio album House Of Music. The lead track promoted to radio was "Let's Get Down", a midtempo funky jam that in the radio mix featured rapper DJ Quik. 

 "Let's Get Down" made the pop airplay top-40, climbing to #30, and all the way to #4 on the R&B Airplay tally, but since at the time the song wasn't available as a commercial "single", it was kept off of both lists at its biggest weeks. However, the trio followed up with the blues-rock "Thinking Of You", which included "Let's Get Down" on the single, and with Billboard magazine's rules at the time combining airplay and sales of both songs, the two-fer finally made it on to the big chart, and subsequently into the top-40...

"Thinking Of You" pushed the "double-A" single into the top-40 in June of 1997. The combined songs rose to #5 on Billboard's R&B chart as well. Internationally, "Let's Get Down" went to #8 in New Zealand and #33 in the UK, and "Thinking Of You" rose to #36 in New Zealand. The House Of Music album reached #32 on the Billboard 200 albums chart (and #10 on the R&B specific albums list), and sold over a million copies. A third radio release from the record, "Boys and Girls", wasn't released commercially, and only made it to #52 on Billboard's R&B Airplay chart. 

Saadiq left the group shortly after to continue as a solo artist, with a brief stint in another act he created, Lucy Pearl, with En Vogue member Ali Shaheed Muhammed from A Tribe Called Quest. Wiggins and Riley replaced him with Amar Khalil for shows, but they haven't released any new music on their own. However, they appeared on Alicia Keys' single "Diary" in 2004, ending up with a #8 pop/#2 R&B hit and a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Duo/Group Performance, losing out to Alicia's other collab with Usher, "My Boo". 

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Here's Tony! Toni! Tone! performing the song live on The Late Show with David Letterman...

And finally, joined by DJ Quik for a live stint on the kids' sketch show All That in 1996...

Up tomorrow: Spicy alt-rock band take a ride for Beavis & Butthead.