Songoftheday 12/12/18 - Lately there seems to be some insecurities about the way I feel, where I wanna be boy you know is with you...

"Right Here/Human Nature"/"Downtown" - SWV
from the albums It's About Time (1992) and Free Willy (Original Soundtrack) (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (three weeks) / #36 Hot 100 Airplay (for "Downtown")
Weeks in the Top-40: 19 / 2 Hot 100 Airplay (for "Downtown")

Today's song(s) of the day comes from the female R&B trio SWV, who had scored back-to-back massive pop singles with their second ("I'm So Into You") and third ("Weak") releases, the latter spending a couple weeks at #1 in the summer of 1993. For their follow-up they (and their producers) went back to their debut single, "Right Here". Written by producer Brian Alexander Morgan, the original version was a rather straightforward R&B track that borrowed from new jack swing without embracing it wholeheartedly. It went to a respectable #13 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart, but only managed to slip up to #92 on their pop Hot 100 list. With the re-released version, overseen by Teddy Riley, the song is "mashed up" (decades before it was a thing) with Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" to give it an immediate recognition the original didn't sport. Jackson, who was involved with the movie Free Willy and had his own "Will You Be There" track on the soundtrack, also got this on that album as well, and even let his concert footage be used in the music video, while a nineteen-year-old Pharrell Williams introduces the group at the start of the record...

The "Human Nature" remix of "Right Here" became SWV's third top ten pop hit in October of 1993. The song spent seven weeks at #1 on Billboard's R&B chart, by far their biggest success on that list (partly due to the flip-side, which I'll come to shortly). Internationally, the single made the top ten in the UK (#3), New Zealand (#7), and Ireland (#10), and reached the top-40 in the Netherlands (#16), Canada (#19), Australia (#20), Sweden (#21), Belgium (#28), France (#31), Germany (#33), and Iceland (#35).

Because of the success of the single, which had already saturated urban radio at that time, the "B-Side" of the single began getting substantial airplay, so much so that it was listed along with "Right Here" on the chart. On the pop Hot 100 airplay list in Billboard, "Downtown" climbed as high as #36. Produced by Genard Parker, who wrote the song with Gina Gomez and Kenny Ortiz, the percussive track fit much better on soul-dominated stations...

Besides its top-40 placement on the American pop airplay chart, "Downtown" also hit #19 in the UK on its own.

A final single release from It's About Time, the slow jam "Always On My Mind", was a big success on the R&B chart, climbing to #8, while peaking below the halfway mark on the pop Hot 100 at #54.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's the original version of "Right Here", which was a top-20 R&B hit in 1992..