Songoftheday 5/28/19 - It's 12 past midnight don't close your eyes, your soul's half alive and I'll be by your side...
from the album Storyteller (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #11 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 34
Today's song of the day comes from the dance queen of second chances, Crystal Waters, who had landed a left-field top ten pop crossover in the summer of 1991 with "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)". With being a club track played on mainstream radio, along with the unexpected song theme, it would have been easy at the time to categorize this as standard "one-hit wonder" fare. And for a bit it seemed that way too, with no other singles making the pop Hot 100 (although her debut album scored two top-40 hits in the UK, along with a "Megamix" that also did the trick at #39). Coupled with the fact that it took three years for Waters to reemerge with a second album would normally follow that VH1: Where Are They Now? pattern of failure on the sophomore try. But in this case, that would not happen. Written by Crystal with her producers/remixers the Basement Boys (Thomas Davis, Teddy Douglas, and Jay Steinhour), "100% Pure Love" was a smooth house music throwdown that upped the amount of musical hooks without a single iota of "deep content". And even though it didn't reach the top ten like "Gypsy Woman" did, the record became her most remembered and revered song by far...
"100% Pure Love" just missed the pop top ten in America, peaking at #11 for two weeks in October of 1994. The song spent over eleven months on the Hot 100, then one of the longest stays in history. It also climbed to #38 on the R&B chart in Billboard magazine, while the dance remixes helped it top their Dance Club Play list for two weeks. Internationally, the single climbed all the way to #2 in Australia, and made the top-40 in the Finland (#14), UK (#15), the Netherlands (#15), Switzerland (#20), Iceland (#25), Austria (#26), Ireland (#30), Belgium (#31), and Germany (#33). Surprisingly, "100% Pure Love" missed the top-40 in Canada at #42, and in New Zealand at #44.
Crystal's follow-up single, "What I Need", also topped the Dance Club Play chart in America, but only managed to scoot up to #82 on the pop Hot 100. Meanwhile, the "B-Side" of the single, "Ghetto Day", was a top-40 hit in the UK at #40. A third release, "Relax", became her third dance chart-topper from the Storyteller album, while getting to #37 on the British singles chart.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the extended club mix that helped it top the Dance chart for two weeks...
And Crystal doing a live (to track) appearance on BET...
and finally, at a Pride event in Iowa in 2013...
Up tomorrow: Singer/songwriter/producer star is asking about frequency.
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