Songoftheday 1/26/19 - I walk the wire every night I can't decide between wrong and right...
from the album Body & Soul (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6
Today's song of the day comes from British pop singer Rick Astley, who had broken away from the production team of Stock Aitken Waterman that helped him get to fame in the mid-1980s to go on his own for his third album Free in 1991, scoring a top ten pop hit in America with "Cry For Help" in the process. Two years later, he returned with his fourth effort, Body & Soul, which Rick again co-produced with Gary Stevenson. The first single released in the UK and Europe, "The Ones You Love", didn't do well, missing the top-40 in Britain (#48) and Germany (#54). However things improved with the second offering, a classic ballad with Rick in perfect voice. "Hopelessly", written by Astley with Rick Fisher (of Naked Eyes and Climie Fisher fame), was directed straight for the middle-age women market, or "soccer moms", if you will, and easy listening radio success helped it up the pop charts...
"Hopelessly" became Astley's seventh (and so far final) top-40 pop hit in America in October of 1993. The song was huge on "easy listening" radio stations, peaking at #4 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary format chart, staying on the list for over six months. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in his native Britain at #33, while in Canada the track climbed up to #8. After that success, "The Ones You Love" was served as the follow-up in the West, reaching #19 on the American Adult Contemporary tally and #54 on the Canadian Singles chart.
The following year, Astley announced he was retiring from music to devote his time to his family. He came back ten years later with a single, "Sleeping", that was only released in Europe, and was a minor hit at #60 in Germany and #69 in Switzerland. (Check it out, it's a cool, smooth tune.) In 2005, Rick recorded a covers album, Portrait, which reached the top-40 in the UK, signalling a change in momentum. A preemptive attempt at a comeback was made in 2010 with the single "Lights Out", which was supposed to lead into a new album, but the song sputtered out at #97, not due to its inadequacies, but a victim to the brutal pop scene in those days that ignored anyone over 30. It would take until 2016, with the flood of 1980s nostalgia in full force, that allowed Rick to come back on his own terms. The first salvo was his album 50, and while none of the songs from it made the charts (at that time only a sales-based idiom), the album was massive, going all the way to #1 and going Platinum in the UK. His most recent record, Beautiful Life, also got to a respectable #6 in 2018.
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Here's Rick performing "Hopelessly" live on a TV appearance in 1993
Up tomorrow: Flighty R&B trio is willing to just hang.
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