Songoftheday 1/7/20 - So no one told you life was gonna be this way, your job's a joke you're broke your love life's D.O.A...

"I'll Be There For You" / "This House Is Not A Home" - The Rembrandts
from the albums Friends (Original Soundtrack) and LP (Rembrandts, 1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #17 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak (for "I'll Be There For You"): #1 (eight weeks)

Today's song(s) of the day come from the alternative-pop duo the Rembrandts, who had scored a top-20 pop hit in the spring of 1991 with "Just The Way It Is, Baby". The following year, the duo of Danny Wilde and Phil Solem released their sophomore effort, Untitled, but with the changing pop music scene sliding away from "adult contemporary" sounds like Wilson Phillips and Michael Bolton, the album missed the sales chart, and the lead single "Johnny Have You Seen Her" only managed to get to #54 on the Pop Hot 100 in America (though it was a moderate rock radio hit at #17 on the modern list and #24 on the mainstream list).

In 1994, the duo was commissioned to record the theme song for a new television show about young single New Yorkers, Friends. The result, "I'll Be There For You", was written by Solem and Wilde along with (the late) songwriter Ailee Willis, TV score composer Michael Skloff, and the show's producers David Crane and Marta Kauffman. The show quickly became the juggernaut of the weekly TV schedule's ratings, and the one and a half minute theme was eventually expanded to be a real song, appearing as a bonus track on the Rembrandts' third album LP, which was released that same month of May of 1995. Since the song wasn't initially released as a single, even though it rose quickly to top the pop airplay charts for eight weeks in the summer of 1995, it was ineligible to place on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart (a rule revoked in 1998). But another rule of the magazine's "official" pop chart kicked in when the follow-up single, "This House Is Not A Home", was released commercially, with "I'll Be There For You" as the "B-Side". Since "I'll Be There For You" hadn't been on the chart yet, and did become commercially available on the single, suddenly that single debuted in the top-20 on the pop chart mostly due to points from the residual airplay that "I'll Be There For You" was getting. So while the song didn't get the full recognition by Casey Kasem that it should have, "I'll Be There For You" became one of the biggest hits of the year no matter in the ears of Americans. The music video featured the cast "playing along" with the band...

The single of "This House Is Not A Home" backed with "I'll Be There For You" reached the top-20 on the American pop chart in October of 1995, when the first Friends "soundtrack" compilation would be released (it would also spawn another radio hit with Hootie and the Blowfish's "I Go Blind"). On Billboard's Adult Contemporary radio chart, where non-single radio cuts can appear, "I'll Be There For You" spent seven weeks at #1, while on the Mainstream Rock chart, it climbed as high as #23. Internationally, "I'll Be There For You" was released as a single, and went to #1 in Canada and reached the top-five in England twice, going to #3 in 1995, then in 1997 another chart run peaking at #5. The record also made the top ten in Australia (#3), Iceland (#10), Ireland (#3), New Zealand (#3), and Norway (#5).

Despite the huge success of the song, the pair didn't last, splitting up in 1997 with Wilde attempting to continue the "Rembrandts" name for one more album, Spin This. Solem and Wilde reunited in 2001 for the next set, Lost Together, but have only released hits sets (re-recorded or original) until this year, when the pair released Via Satellite, a whole album of originals.

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Now here's the "A-side" of the single, "This House Is Not A Home", which admitted got scant airplay especially compared to "I'll Be There For You", but rules are rules (and at least this single had the studio version, compared to other hits from Melissa Etheridge and Alanis Morissette that had a live version, but still was allowed to pilfer the radio points). I kind of like this song more, and felt it got overshadowed by the drawn out success of the TV theme song...