Songoftheday 9/7/19 - I know what you're doing I know why you dialed my number, I know what you're doing I know why you care...
from the album Wild Seed - Wild Flower (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 29
Today's song of the day comes from alternative soul/pop singer Dionne Farris, who grew up in the town next to mine in Bordentown, New Jersey. After graduating college, she was eventually find herself in Atlantic, writing songs and hooking up with the alt-hip-hop collective Arrested Development. Although she refused to join the group officially, Dionne sung a prominent part of the act's breakthrough single "Tennessee", which was a top ten pop hit in summer of 1992, so much so that many people (like myself) had though she was the lead singer from her place in the music video, and her part in a couple other tracks on the album. And despite her success with the song, she couldn't deal with Arrested Development leader Speech's heavy-handedness and left during the tour behind the album in 1992.
Waiting it out for a record deal that gave her space, Farris finally put together her debut album Wild Seed - Wild Flower for Columbia Records in 1994, a pretty sweet gig (and one replicated by the Fugees' Lauryn Hill a bit later). Future American Idol judge Randy Jackson helped produce nine of the fifteen tracks, the majority of which Dionne had a hand in writing. But neither of those applied to the lead track and first single "I Know". Written by gospel music bassist Milton Davis who co-produced with Farris, along with William Duvall, a punk rock artist from Atlanta that eventually would front the band Alice In Chains, the bright, punchy pop tune with a rock attitude without the electric guitars paired with Farris' soulful yet understated voice provided the perfect kind of fodder for pop radio in the early 1990s, so much so that it way outlasted its initial run to settle in as a staple on adult pop stations. And the music video, which its big use of ring lights even made a bathroom setting seem cool, created a result that was a funkier and sassier relative of Beck's "Loser"...
"I Know" became Farris' first, biggest, and only hit on Billboard magazine's pop Hot 100 chart in America, reaching the top ten in May of 1995. The song also spent a week at #2 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") chart, spending 41 weeks on the list. Internationally, the single topped the Canadian singles chart for a week, while making the top-40 in New Zealand (#10), Australia (#16), and France (#26). In the UK, the track charted twice, before and after its American success, but both times stalling right under the top-40, besting out at #41. At the Grammy Awards in 1996, "I Know" was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, losing out to Annie Lennox for her "No More I Love You's".
Radio just loved the song so much that when it came time to release a follow-up, they wouldn't stop playing "I Know", keeping it at the top of their "recurrent" charts for weeks and weeks overshadowing any momentum for anything else. Hence second single "Don't Ever Touch Me (Again)", written by Dionne with guitarist David Harris and revamped from the album version, couldn't even make the pop chart, "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #121. Two more singles from the set, "Passion" and "Food For Thought", went unnoticed, and Columbia basically stopped her promotion. My guess is that the album was just too thoughtful and not as "immediate" as "I Know" with Columbia trying to position Dionne as a female alternative rock star.
Farris would go on to record a couple songs for soundtracks, with her contribution to the movie Love Jones, "Hopeless", doing moderately well, becoming her first top-40 R&B airplay hit at #23 (and hitting #42 in Britain). But while Randy was still by her side in that video, she ended up getting dropped by the label during the recording of her second album For Truth If Not Love. That set would see the light of day a dozen years later in 2007, and since then has recorded a few more independently-released album, most recently DionneDionne, a collaboration with Charlie Hunter, in 2013.
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Here's Dionne appearing on the old Jon Stewart show in 1995...
and finally, live at a jazz club in 2016...
Up tomorrow: A double-shot from the female rocker that had come out of the closet to her biggest success.
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