Songoftheday 11/6/17 - Poor little Dutch girl...
from the album Saxuality (Candy Dulfer, 1990) and Lily Was Here (Original Soundtrack) (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #11 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9
Today's song of the day comes from David A. Stewart, who was half of the new wave duo Eurythmics who had scored ten top-40 pop hits in America through the 1980s with partner Annie Lennox. The pair split up at the end of the decade, with Stewart concentrating on producing and film music. One of those projects had him provide the music for the Dutch film De Kassière ("The Cashier"), a dark piece about a woman with child who lost the father of her baby and makes some tough and criminal choices. One of the songs from the soundtrack, the instrumental "Lily Was Here", ended up becoming the de facto name for the movie, and featured Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer. The daughter of a successful sax man, Hans Dulfer, her sleek and sultry riffs on Stewart's production carried forth even overseas to places the movie never touched, and gave mainstream radio another rare at the time instrumental hit, which Stewart wrote...
"Lily Was Here" climbed all the way to within one notch of the top ten on the American pop chart in July of 1991. The song also made it to #6 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, and crossed over to #60 on their R&B list. Internationally, the record topped the singles chart in Dulfer's native Holland for six weeks, and reached the top ten in Belgium (#2), Norway (#2), the UK (#6), Australia (#10), Ireland (#10), Sweden (#10), and Switzerland (#10). It would be her final American radio success, but she continued in Europe quite nicely. The title track to her album, "Saxuality", reached #3 in the Netherlands and #60 in the UK, while a third single from her debut, "Heavenly City", peaked at #50 in Holland. In 1993, Dulfer released her second album, Sax-A-Go-Go, and the title track got to #12 in the Netherlands, while the album reached the top-5 on the American Jazz Albums chart. She's been putting out albums ever since - her most recent, Together, came out in April of 2017. As for Stewart, after spending most of the decade apart, reunited with Lennox for more Eurythmics records and tours in 1998.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Dulfer and Stewart live in concert in 1989...
...and Dulfer again at a show in 2009...
And finally, a twelve minute long jam from Dulfer expanding on the song...
Up tomorrow: Production duo grab their own spotlight with a spelling lesson.
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