Robbed hit of the week 12/2/19: Chris Isaak's "Somebody's Crying"...
from the album Forever Blue (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45
Today's "robbed hit" comes from actor/crooner Chris Isaak, whose haunting ballad "Wicked Game" turned into a left-field hit, reaching the pop top ten in the spring of 1991, two years after the release of the album it came from Heart Shaped World (it caught the ear of people watching the movie The Wild Heart). Despite his great voice and photogenic face, though, it didn't mean a lasting success on the radio. His next album, San Francisco Days, despite a top ten alternative rock radio hit in "Can't Do a Thing (To Stop Me)", which followed the same pattern as "Wicked Game", the single missed the pop chart completely in America, although it was a top-40 hit in the UK at #36. The album also made the American albums sales top-40, proving he had a fanbase. His next release in 1995, Forever Blue, included the midtempo ballad "Somebody's Crying", that had tones of Orbison-esque sorrow but the light-hearted treatment of jangle-pop, and mainstream radio here was more receptive...
"Somebody's Crying" stopped short on the pop Hot 100 chart in America under the top-40 in August of 1995. The song rose to #27 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, and got to #34 on their Alternative Rock format list. Internationally, the single reached the top tech in Canada (#4) and Australia (#5), while in the UK it spent only one week on the chart at #81. The Forever Blue album again would reach the Top 200 Albums sales chart top-40 at #31 and sold over a million copies, going "platinum". At the Grammy Awards in 1996, "Somebody's Crying" was nominated for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, losing out to Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels", while the Forever Blue album was also up for Best Rock Album, which Alanis Morissette took for Jagged Little Pill. A second single from the album, "Go Walking Down There", climbed to #32 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, but only "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 at #102. Finally, much like how "Wicked Game" got late appreciation, album track "Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing" started to get attention after it appearing in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut film in 1999, and four years after its album release, the song went to #27 on Billboard's Adult Top-40 radio chart, and is my personal favorite of his.
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Here's Chris on the old Jon Stewart Show promoting the single in 1994...
And live in concert...
And finally, a live studio take from 2011...
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