robbed hit of the week 8/6/18 - Swing Out Sister's "Am I The Same Girl?"...

"Am I The Same Girl?" - Swing Out Sister
from the album Get In Touch With Yourself (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the British "sophisti-pop" group Swing Out Sister, who had their "breakout" hit in the fall of 1987 when "Breakout" reached the top ten in the U.S., and follow-up "Twilight World" reached the top-40. Drummer Martin Jackson left the trio during the making of their second album Kaleidoscope World, leaving lead singer Corinne Drewery and musician Andy Connell as a duo with outside help. While their American single "The Waiting Game" climbed all the way to #6 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") chart, the song stalled all the way down at #86 on the American pop chart in 1989.

The pair returned in 1992 with their third effort, Get In Touch With Yourself, with a cover of a soul-pop classic as the first single. "Am I The Same Girl?", written by Eugene Record (lead singer of the 70s R&B hitmakers the Chi-Lites) and Sonny Sanders, the assertive horn-inflected nugget was recorded originally by singer Barbara Acklin for her 1969 album Seven Days Of Night. Her original climbed to #79 on the pop chart and #33 on Billboard's R&B list, her fifth consecutive top-40 placing there...

But before Acklin's version could be put out, the producer of the record, Carl Davis, went and surreptitiously released the instrumental version of the track with an overlaid piano melody as "Soulful Strut" under the moniker of one of Brunswick Records' other acts, Young-Holt Unlimited (even though the true players on the record were the record company house band). The resulting record became a huge hit (and possibly stealing the wind from Acklin's sails), reaching #3 on both the American pop chart and R&B tally...

Swing Out Sister's cover keeps the breeziness of the song with the horn section again making the most of the production, but the overlayering of Corinne's vocals are quite pleasantly lush...

While the duo's version of "Am I The Same Girl?" went to #1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart for a week, the single stopped a few notches short of the pop top-40 in America in October of 1992. Internationally, the song spent a week at #5 in Canada, and reached the top-40 in Italy (#13), the Netherlands (#15), Belgium (#18), and their native Britain (#21). Their follow-up radio single was another mid-tempo lush tune, "notgonnachange", which hit #22 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, and #21 on the Dance Club Play list when it was services to clubs in the early summer of 1992. The song also got to #49 in the UK.

Two years later, Swing Out Sister re-emerged with their fourth record, The Living Return. Their first without long-standing producer Paul O'Duffy, They nevertheless scored another British top-40 hit with a cover of "La-La Means I Love You" from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral (no doubt Americans' biggest exposure to the cover). The pair's most recent chart appearance in the States so far has been in 1997 when "Somewhere In The World", which reunited them with O'Duffy, hit #30 on the Adult Contemporary radio chart. They've continued to release new material - their most recent studio album, Almost Persuaded, came out in 2017 after a successful crowdfunding drive.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Among the artists who have covered "Am I The Same Girl" as a single was pop icon Dusty Springfield, who just missed the British chart at #43 with her take...