Songoftheday 4/14/16 - When you called me up this mornin' told me 'bout the new love you found, I said "I'm happy for you I'm really happy for you"...

"Look Away" - Chicago
from the album Chicago 19 (1988)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 16

Today's song of the day comes from the veteran jazz-rock band Chicago, who had evolved into a soft-rock hitmaking machine by the 1980's, jettisoning lead singer/bassist Peter Cetera in the process. Their nineteenth album (and 16th studio effort) 19 had continued their pop success with the top-5 hit "I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love" in the summer of 1988. The second single from the set was another midlife-crisis rock ballad sung by Bill Champlin, "Look Away". Written by Diane Warren (who also wrote the last single), the break-up track again sported one of the worst videos on MTV, clearly avoiding any appearance of the band until the end, in favor of vapid models doing some sort of emoting and dropping things while a douchebag in glasses runs around town, and nobody's sure who is supposed to be doing the looking away...

"Look Away" brought Chicago their third #1 pop hit in the U.S. in December of 1988. It also topped Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart. Internationally, the single made it to #1 in Canada, and reached the top ten in the Netherlands (#10). It ended up being the top pop hit for 1989 in Billboard magazine (who tracked the chart year from November to November).

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And here's the band performing "Look Away" in concert in 1993...

Up tomorrow: Reggie needs to hablo some Espanol.