Songoftheday 2/8/20 - Sorry I never told you all I wanted to say, and now it's too late to hold you 'cause you've flown away so faraway...
from the album Daydream (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (sixteen weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 26
Today's song of the day comes from the pairing of two of the biggest pop/R&B acts of the 1990s, singer Mariah Carey and vocal group Boyz II Men. Carey's album Daydream had already spun off a huge hit with "Fantasy", which topped the pop chart for eight weeks. Meanwhile Boyz II Men's most recent record, II, had landed a pair of #1 pop hits with "On Bended Knee" and "I'll Make Love To You", the latter of which was holding the record for amount of time at #1, tied with Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" at 14 weeks. Also, by the fall of 1995, they were on the charts as a featured guest on rapper LL Cool J's hip-hop ballad "Hey Lover". For the second single release from Daydream, Mariah got together with the Boyz and together with producer Walter Afanasieff they wrote the ballad "One Sweet Day". Singing about the people they've lost in their lives, most particularly those lost to the AIDS crisis, the song had an immediate connection with fans or either act as well as the general public, and when it was put out as a physical single, it set new records, first by making its debut at #1, only the fourth time its happened and consequently the second time from Mariah. And that would only be the start...
"One Sweet Day" spent a massive 16 weeks at #1 on Billboard magazine's official pop Hot 100 chart starting in December of 1995, breaking Boyz II Men's former record and claiming it until just last year, when my little precious gay cowboy rapper Lil Nas X broke it with "Old Town Road". The song took 13 weeks at the top of Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, while reigning on their Adult Top-40 format list for a week. Surprisingly, on the R&B chart the song was stuck in the #2 position for nine weeks, kept out by Whitney Houston's "Exhale". Internationally, the single went to #1 in Canada and New Zealand, and hit the top ten in Australia (#2), the Netherlands (#2), Ireland (#4), France (#5), Denmark (#5), the UK (#6), Norway (#6), Sweden (#7), and Belgium (#8F/#8W). It reached the top-40 in Switzerland (#12), Finland (#16), Iceland (#20), Germany (#25), and Austria (#25). At the Grammy Awards in 1996, "One Sweet Day" was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Collaboration, which went to The Chieftains and Van Morrison for "Have I Told You Lately", and also for Record Of The Year, which Seal took for "Kiss From A Rose".
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Here's Mariah and the Boyz on her Fantasy tour in 1995...
...next up, at the Grammys in 1996...
and at the Nobel Peace Prize concert that same year...
She also brought them out on her Anaheim date of her Adventures of Mimi tour in 2006...
And finally, Mariah on her Butterfly Returns show in 2019 with Trey Lorenz filling in...
Up tomorrow: Charleston bar-band rockers are checking their watches.
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