Songoftheday 2/24/20 - I pretend that I'm glad you went away, but these four walls close in more every day...
from the album Words (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 38
Today's song of the day comes from singer/songwriter/producer Tony Rich, a native of Detroit who came on as a songwriter for Babyface and L.A. Reid's label LaFace Records in the early 1990s. Eventually, he signed as an artist recording as The Tony Rich Project, and released his debut single "Nobody Knows" in the fall of 1995. A gentle ballad that convinced everyone was a Babyface original, the break-up ballad from a delusional lover caught on with both urban and mainstream audiences and became his first and by far biggest hit...
"Nobody Knows" became Rich's first and only top-40 pop hit, stopping just one notch from the top in March of 1996. The song spent seven weeks in the runner-up position on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, and hit #7 on the newly-minted Adult Top-40 format list. Most surprising, it missed the top ten on the R&B chart, peaking at #11 and spending 33 weeks on that tally. Internationally, the single topped the Irish chart for a week, and made the top ten in Canada (#2), Australia (#2), and the UK (#4). It also hit the top-40 in the Netherlands (#13), Sweden (#15), New Zealand (#19), and Iceland (#35). Rich's debut album Words was released at the start of 1996, and reached the top 40 on the pop (#31) and R&B (#18) albums sales chart. At the 1997 Grammy Awards, Rich was nominated in four categories, winning Best R&B Album, and losing out on Best Male Pop Vocal (to Eric Clapton's "Change The World"), and Best New Artist (which LeAnn Rimes won).
Rich's follow-up single was "Like A Woman", a midtempo loosely produced jam that peaked in that most frustrating of spots, #41, while also stopping at #42 on the R&B chart, though Adult Contempoary radio gave it more love, propelling it to #30. It also got a Grammy nom in 1997 for Best R&B Male Vocal, which went to Luther Vandross for his Your Secret Love album. A third release from Words, the ballad "Leavin'", managed to go to #53 on the R&B chart while stalling down at #88 on the pop Hot 100.
Rich returned in 1998 with a second album on LaFace, Birdseye, but while the set blipped on to the R&B albums chart at #66, it was completely ignored otherwise, compounded by of course nasty label non-promotion issues. Since then Rich has gone the indie route, releasing five more records, the latest being 2017's Encaustic.
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Here's Tony appearing on Letterman promoting the single...
...and on the TV show Soul Acoustic...
Later that year, country singer Kevin Sharp released a country-styled cover of "Nobody Knows" as his debut single. The song translated perfectly to that genre, and spent a month (four weeks) at #1 on Billboard's Country Singles chart...
And finally, Rich on the Midnight Jam jazz-soul show...
Up tomorrow: A side project from a seminal lo-fi rock band scored a top-40 pop hit from a childish film.
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