Songoftheday 2/8/17 - Ain't no personal thing boy but you have got to stay away, far far away from my heart my heart...
from the album Jane Child (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 14
The song of the day for today comes from singer/songwriter Jane (Richman) Child, who grew up in Canada, but found her way to the States, where she ended up releasing her self-titled debut album in 1989. The second single released from the set, like the rest of the album, had Jane write, sing, and perform all the instruments on. "Don't Wanna Fall In Love" was a joyous slice of dance-pop that sports the chunkiest of synth chords over her singing about falling into the "bad love" situation. As pessimistic as the lyrics were, she carried such an upbeat melody with that wall of sound production that it was easy to forget, and one that made me put the song on repeat constantly. Coupled with her striking appearance of a mushroom of spiked hair over the wall of dreadlocks and that nosering chain set her apart from anything out at the time. But at least she had the chops to match...
"Don't Wanna Fall In Love" became Child's sole top-40 hit in the U.S., spending three weeks in the runner-up position in April of 1990. New Jack Swing king Teddy Riley completely remixed the track for R&B stations, causing it to rise to #6 on Billboard's chart. The remixes of the song, including one from Shep Pettibone that criminally was left off the CD single, climbed to #11 on their Dance Club Play list as well. Internationally, the single went to #4 in her native Canada, and made the top-40 in New Zealand (#12), Sweden (#16), the UK (#22), and Ireland (#26).
Jane's first single, "Welcome To The Real World", was re-issued after the success of this one, but it stopped at #49 on the American pop chart. It took four years for her sophomore album Here Not There to arrive, but by that time the dance-pop of the late 80s had long passed by mainstream radio, and aside from "All I Do", which went to #25 on Billboard's Dance chart, it went relatively unnoticed. She's released another independent album since, but it's this song that will be her legacy, and it's respectable enough for that.
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Here's Riley's soulful remix that sent the song to the top ten of the R&B chart, the first of many pop hits redone for this market in the first half of the decade...
...and Shep Pettibone's crazy-good remix of the track for the clubs...
Lastly, here's Jane on the Wayne Brady show singing "Don't Wanna Fall In Love" with the host in 2004 (even when she was under the weather...)
Up tomorrow: Punk goddess goes electrically Down Under to rock out her last top-40 hit...
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