Songoftheday 3/28/19 - I´m lying beside you just thinking about us, too tired to go to sleep and too much in love...
from the album Desire Walks On (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #39 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 2
Today's song of the day comes from the classic rock band Heart, who had started the 1990s with their Brigade album, which spun off three top-40 pop hits in America with "Stranded", "I Didn't Want To Need You", and the #2 smash "All I Want To Do Is Make Love To You". After touring behind the record, they released a concert album, Rock The House Live!, and landed a #20 hit on the Mainstream Rock radio chart with their cover of John Farnham's "You're The Voice". Also during this break, Ann and Nancy Wilson put together the Lovemongers, a more unplugged version of themselves. So by the time of their next Heart studio album, it was a three year stretch where, like yesterday's SOTD artist Phil Collins, the mainstream music scene had shifted dramatically away from adult pop/rock into younger genres like alternative and hip-hop. Desire Walks On was put out in the fall of 1993, with a reprisal of an earlier rock staple, "Black On Black II", promoted to rock radio without a physical release. It soared to #4 on the Mainstream Rock format list in Billboard, but only spent eight weeks on the entire list. So for the first time it fell to a Nancy Wilson lead vocal to be the first true single from the set. "Will You Be There (In The Morning)", written by "Mutt" Lange but produced by Duane Baron and John Purdell, is an incredibly catchy but lyrically slight lite-rock number that has a killer chorus that rivaled the best of their later work...
"Will You Be There" became Heart's twentieth and to-date last top-40 pop hit in February of 1994. The song also climbed to #15 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, spending 23 weeks on that list. Internationally, the single was much bigger in Canada, peaking at #8 there, and made the top-40 in New Zealand (#14), The UK (#19), Poland (#21), and Australia (#24). Their follow-up release would be a cover of Donna Summer's 1982 pop hit "The Woman In Me", which went to #24 on the Adult Contemporary list, "bubbled under" the American pop Hot 100 at #105, and rose up to a respectable #13 in Canada. Also north of the border, the album track "Back To Avalon" (my favorite from the record) climbed to #60.
After another live record, The Road Home, where the title track just missed the top-40 in Canada at #47, the sisters took a break from recording new "Heart" material for almost a decade, with Ann occasionally touring and the siblings recording two sets under the Lovemongers moniker. Coming back into the studio in 2004 with an entirely new lineup of "Heart", the band released Jupiters Darling in 2004 under the label Sovereign, but while the album managed to scrape up to the top half of the albums chart (#94), but besides the rocker "The Oldest Story In The World" (Rock Airplay, #22), radio hardly give it a notice. Six years later, they re-emerged with Red Velvet Car, which sprung a minor hit on Adult Contemporary radio with "Hey You", while the album itself reached #10 on the albums sales chart in Billboard. Building on that success, they followed up quickly two years later with Fanatic, an intimate recording that made it to #24 on the albums chart. The Wilson sisters had a memorable 2013, with being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as a performance of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" at the Kennedy Center Honors that "went viral" and got more attention than anything they had done in the last decade.
In 2016, Heart released their most recent album Beautiful Broken. However, during the tour behind the album, the sisters had a huge fall-out from an incident where Ann's husband hit Nancy's kids (for leaving the trailer door open with their dogs inside, I probably would've done the same) which not only soured the tour but kept Ann and Nancy not talking for years. Thankfully this year they put their past behind and are planning a tour this summer.
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Here's the band appearing on the Jon Stewart show to perform the song...
And finally, the band released the single in Spanish, as "Te Quedaras (En La Manana)"...
Up tomorrow: Canine rapper serves up cocktails.
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