Songoftheday 12/19/17 - I don't like to worry about no one else, I like to be you know alone and free...
from the album Hard At Play (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #21 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6
Today's song of the day comes from the pop-rock workman's band Huey Lewis and the News, who had started out the new decade with their single "Couple Days Off", which just missed the top ten on the American pop chart in the summer of 1991. The second single from their Hard At Play album would be the easy-going pop of "It Hit Me Like A Hammer". Written by Lewis with uber-producer "Mutt" Lange (who actually didn't produce this song - it was Steely Dan's engineer Bill Schnee), the song had Huey in the character of a loner who finally falls for a lady hard...
"It Hit Me Like A Hammer" became Huey and the News' seventeenth top-40 hit (and final "physical" top-40 single) on the Hot 100 singles chart in September of 1991. The song also climbed all the way to #10 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart. Internationally, the record went to #51 in Germany. It was followed by the single "Build Me Up", which missed the pop chart but climbed to #27 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. The fourth offering from Hard at Play, the soul number "He Don't Know", co-written by Don Covay, landed at #40 on the magazine's Adult Contemporary format chart. In 1993, a contribution to a tribute set to R&B great Curtis Mayfield, a cover of his "It's Alright", didn't get released as a single but managed to climb to #37 on Billboard's Pop Airplay chart.
After this one album, the band left label EMI to head to Elektra Records, where they released their covers album Four Chords and Several Years Ago in 1994. While two songs from the record reached the top ten on the Adult Contemporary chart ("Some Kind Of Wonderful" at #7 and "But It's Alright" at #5), both stalled beneath the pop top-40. Mario Cipollina, the band's original bass player, left after touring behind this album, as did guitarist Chris Hayes in 2001. Between that time, the band had another top ten Adult Contemporary hit with a new cut from their 1996 greatest hits set, "100 Years From Now" (#10 AC). Also, Huey himself starred in the movie Duets with Gwyneth Paltrow, and their duet of the Smokey Robinson hit "Cruisin'" ended up topping the Adult Contemporary list for a week. The band's most recent radio hit came in 2001 with "Let Her Go And Start Over" from their Plan B record, which peaked at #23 on that Adult pop chart. Their most recent album, Soulville, was another collection of covers in 2010. But they continue to have a lot of success touring behind their past laurels.
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Here's the band in concert in 1991...
And finally, the "single" mix, which featured a sax solo...
Up tomorrow: Grammy-winning queen of blues rock gives good gossip.
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