Songoftheday 5/2/15 - Girl the first time we met it took me by surprise, ooh girl you walked into my life with those street corner blues...

"Stone Love" - Kool & The Gang
from the album Forever (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10

Today's SOTD comes from the funk/pop band Kool & The Gang, who were still riding the 80's strong, with their sixth hit album of the decade Forever starting out with a top-ten pop and R&B hit "Victory". The second single from the record was the effervescent pop sweetness of "Stone Love", written and produced by the band. A straight-ahead love song with a zillion synths in play under J.T.Taylor's smooth-as-silk voice is what we've got here...

"Stone Love" became Kool & The Gang's twelfth and so far most recent top-ten pop hit in America in May of 1987. The track also crossed over to both the R&B (#4) and Adult Contemporary (#11) charts in Billboard, while the remix nicked the Dance Club Play list at #41. Internationally, the record went to the top-40 in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and just missed that mark at #45 in the UK.

While the other two singles from the album missed the pop top-40, they did respectably on other formats, with "Holiday" reaching #9 on the R&B chart and "Special Way" peaking at #6 on the Adult Contemporary tally. After the album ran its course, Taylor left the band for a solo career. One more album without him in 1989 gave them a top-30 R&B hit with "Raindrops", before fading from the spotlight in the 90s. The first decade of the 2000s found the band back with reworks of older works, going to #8 in Britain in 2003 backing Atomic Kitten on "Ladies Night", while they teamed with Jamiroquai for "Hollywood Swingin'" which went to #5 on the American dance chart two years later. In 2006, the band slipped onto the R&B chart at #96 with "Steppin' Into Love".

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..and here's the band performing the song live (really) on TV in Germany in 1987...

Up tomorrow: long-haired popster is playing some games.