Songoftheday 4/10/14 - You're tellin' lies so don't you criticize, yeah I got used all messed up and abused...

Supertramp - "Cannonball"
from the album Brother Where You Bound (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 7

Today's Song of the Day is by the British "light" progressive rock band Supertramp, whose album famous last words... had scored them a couple more top-40 pop hits in America with "It's Raining Again" and "My Kind Of Lady". However, after a world tour behind the album, singer Roger Hodgson left the group, pursuing a solo career and almost nabbing a top-40 hit with "Had A Dream (Sleeping With The Enemy)". The others in Supertramp, including co-lead singer Roger Davies, continued to record and perform together, and released their eighth album Brother Where You Bound three years after their last. With a more experimental and jazzier sound than their more recent work, the album only had six track, with one going over 16 minutes long. One of the songs, "Cannonball", was clipped down from its original 7 1/2 minutes for radio consumption, and with a video seemingly culled from Quest For Fire, it got the band back on MTV and the airwaves in America...

"Cannonball" became Supertramp's ninth and so-far latest top-40 pop hit in the U.S. in July of 1985, while scaling to #4 on the Mainstream Rock radio chart and #9 on the Dance Club Play list in Billboard Magazine. Internationally, it only was a top-40 hit in places like Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The band's next album, Free As A Bird, didn't give them any pop success in America, but they did manage to top the dance chart with the remixes of single "I'm Beggin' You", which also went to #42 on the adult-contemporary chart in the US. By the end of the decade, Supertramp would be fractured, though they reappeared with a somewhat different lineup under Davies in 1996, where they made the Canadian top-40 with "You Win, I Lose". Although there's been a fan campaign for their reunion, it looks quite unlikely the original band will get back together, though in spirit they live on, as their album track "Don't Leave Me Now" (a fave of mine) has been riding the French singles chart off and on for the past year.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's the band doing a TV promo in 1985...

Up tomorrow: Aussie soft-rock kings, with no adornment.