Songoftheday 4/20/18 - Here's a little story about life everybody that lives surely dies, a lot of people ask the questions why...
from the album Joe Public (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 18
Today's song of the day comes from the R&B group Joe Public, who came together in Buffalo, New York in the late 1980s. They got their first break as studio musicians and songwriters, writing and performing up Keith Sweat's top-20 pop hit from 1991, "Keep It Comin'". The following year, the band, with lead singers Kevin Scott along with Dwight Wyatt, J.R. Sayles, and Jake Carter, released their self-titled debut album. The first single from the record, "Live And Learn", sounded a heck of a lot like "Keep It Comin'", but the smooth-new-jack swing track did much better on the charts...
"Live and Learn" became Joe Public's first and only top-40 pop hit in May of 1992. The song spent a week at #3 on Billboard's R&B chart, while the remixes helped it go to #36 on their Dance Club Play tally. Internationally, the single was a top ten hit in New Zealand (#3), the Netherlands (#4), and Belgium (#10). It also climbed to #16 in Germany, #22 in Sweden, and just missed the top-40 in the UK at #43.
The second single from Joe Public, the midtempo adult soul of "I Miss You", followed "Live" into the R&B top ten at #8, but stalled down at #55 on the American pop chart (in New Zealand, where "Live and Learn" did the best internationally, it peaked at a respectable #18). That was followed by the new jack jam "I've Been Watchin'", which got to #54 on the R&B chart, and "Do You Everynite", which popped on to the pop chart at #98.
Two years later, the band released their second and so far final CD, Easy Come Easy Go, and while the title track made it up to #13 in New Zealand, in the States it only managed to scoot up to #81 on the R&B chart. They have continued as songwriters, but have had no new music since then released.
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And here's Joe Public performing "Live and Learn" on MTV Unplugged in 1992, showing how tight they were as a band...
Up tomorrow: House music gets a little simple and into the top-40.
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