Songoftheday 2/7/20 - Everyone falls in love sometime sometimes it's wrong and sometimes it's right, for every win someone must fail...
from the album Waiting To Exhale (Original Soundtrack) (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 20
Today's song of the day is from Whitney Houston, who by the mid 90s had experienced the height of her career, starring in the movie The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner. The soundtrack to that film had scored Whitney the biggest hit of her career and at the time the longest-running #1 hit, a cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You", as well as top-40 hits "I'm Every Woman", "I Have Nothing", "Run To You", and the top-40 airplay/#1 club hit "Queen Of The Night". Also, she had a long-running top-40 pop/R&B hit duet with her husband Bobby Brown, "Something In Common", from his album Bobby.
Whitney didn't waste any time to star in her next movie, Waiting To Exhale, a "women of a certain age" vehicle that also featured Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon. Navigating between the romantic and professional histories of four women, this film was pretty groundbreaking at the time for its all-African American cast for a "mainstream" movie. But of course the star power of both Whitney and Angela helped it become a financial success, as well as spawning another high-profile soundtrack, which included three songs from Houston that eventually would all be released as singles, as well as other A-list artists like Mary J. Blige, Aretha Franklin, TLC, and Brandy. The first of seven singles put out from the set was Whitney's title theme of sorts "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)". Written and produced by Babyface, the downtempo ballad was restrained and much more nuanced than the in-your-face belting of The Bodyguard, as she sung about moving on with your life after loss...
"Exhale" became Whitney's eleventh #1 pop hit in November of 1995, and it would be her last one as well. It was only the third single to debut at #1 at the time after Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone" and Mariah Carey's "Fantasy". The song topped Billboard magazine's R&B chart for a full two months (eight weeks), and climbed to #5 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list. The song even popped on to the newly-christened Adult Top-40 chart at #18. Internationally, the single topped the charts for two weeks in both Canada and Spain, and reached the top ten in New Zealand (#4), Italy (#5), Finland (#6), and Sweden (#10). It also made the top-40 in the UK (#11), the Netherlands (#12), Switzerland (#13), Norway (#14), Austria (#15), Ireland (#16), Belgium (#16W/#22F), Australia (#18), France (#23), Germany (#26), and Iceland (#36). At the Grammy Awards in 1997, "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" won Babyface an award for Best R&B Song, and was nominated for three others: Female R&B Vocal, which went to Toni Braxton for "You're Makin' Me High"; Best Song for Visual Media, which Babyface lost to Diane Warren for Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me" from Up Close & Personal (it didn't help that three of the nominations were for Babyface from the soundtrack); and biggest of all, was up for Song of the Year, which was won by the team that wrote Eric Clapton's "Change The World" (which Babyface ironically produced).
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At the Grammy Awards, Whitney performed "Exhale" as part of a medley of songs from the album with Brandy, Aretha, Chaka, Mary, and CeCe Winans...
and in concert in 1997...
During that same run Whitney went into the audience and had Monica and Shirley Caesar throw down vamps at the end...
And here she was in 2000 as she was touring and promoting behind the My Love Is Your Love album...
And finally, on her 2010 world tour in Korea...
Up tomorrow: The song that beat Whitney's record-breaking stay at the top.
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