Songoftheday 10/11/15 - The whispers in the morning of lovers sleeping tight, are rolling by like thunder now as I look in your eyes...

"Power Of Love" - Laura Branigan
from the album Touch (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's song of the day comes from singer Laura Branigan, who was one of the biggest American mainstream pop singers of the first half of the 80s, with a half-dozen top-40 hits by 1985. However, the last of them, "Spanish Eddie", the lead-off track from her Hold Me album, just scraped that level for a couple of weeks, and her next set, Touch, started out with the Stock Aitken Waterman (of Bananarama and Dead Or Alive fame) produced single "Shattered Glass", which criminally stopped short at #48. Struggling to find pop radio success again, Laura released a cover of another European hit (like her "Gloria" and "Solitaire") to turn things around. This time is was Jennifer Rush's "Power Of Love", which was the biggest hit in the UK in 1985, but overlooked relatively in the States. Laura definitely had the voice to carry the song, and with a "power-ballad"-style arrangement, she found favor with stations and audiences again, even without an accompanying video...

Laura's version of "Power Of Love" became her seventh and final top-40 pop hit in America in January of 1988. The single also climbed to #19 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart. A third release from the Touch album, "Cry Wolf", managed to get to #20 on that latter list as well (and later be covered by Stevie Nicks). Laura started the 90s with another club track, "Moonlight On Water", which was her final minor pop hit at #59. A second single, "Never In A Million Years", went to #22 on the Adult Contemporary list. After another record went unnoticed in a musical landscape dominated by rock and hip-hop, Branigan took what would be her final bow with a cover of Donna Summer's "Dim All The Lights" from her greatest hits set that peaked at #36 on Billboard's Dance chart. After that, she cared for her husband, and briefly appeared in the musical Love, Janis about Janis Joplin. Sadly, Laura passed away in 2004 at 52 from an aneurysm, but her voice and her music will be timeless.

As for "The Power Of Love", not only did Air Supply hit the pop chart in America a year before Laura, but Celine Dion took the song to #1 for a month in 1994.

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Here's Laura performing "The Power Of Love" live in Chile in 1988...

...and again on a very young Joy Behar's show that same year...

...and finally, Laura from 1996 (the best of the bunch)...

Up tomorrow: A group of girls are getting cloudy and chilly.