Robbed hit of the week 6/15/20 - Poe's "Angry Johnny"...
from the album Hello (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #60
This week's "robbed hit" comes from singer/songwriter Anne Danielewski, who records and performs under the moniker Poe. Born to traveling artistic family (her dad was a film director, and brother Mark a writer), she found herself living on her own in New York City still as a teenager. Signed by the Modern imprint on Atlantic Records (historically home to the likes of Etta James and Stevie Nicks), Poe released her debut album Hello in 1995. With guest musicians like Matt Sorum, drummer for Guns N' Roses, the set was critically heralded. The lead single, "Trigger Happy Jack", about an abusive lover, made its way onto Billboard magazine's Alternative Rock radio chart at #27, while "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #106. MTV took to the song, and the exposure set Poe up for her next song to promote to radio, "Angry Johnny". Another moody track about a man gone wrong, rock radio and MTV were again all over the song. With instrumentation like a rock-ier Portishead, the song became her first mainstream radio success...
While "Angry Johnny" went as high as #7 on Billboard magazine's Alternative Rock radio chart, the song wasn't released as a commercial single, making it unable to make their official Hot 100 radio chart, and the mainstream stations playing it made it only rise to #60 on the airplay portion of the list (most like from the dark nature of the lyrics). A third track from the Hello album, the title cut "Hello", also did decently at alternative rock radio, peaking at #13, while the radio-only single made it to #65 on the Hot 100 Airplay list. But that song had the added pull of its dance remixes, done by club favorites E-Smoove and Jason Nevins, and it topped Billboard's Dance Club Play tally for a single week. The Hello album reached the top half of the Billboard 200 sales chart at #71, selling over a half a million copies.
Poe returned in 2001 with her second (and what would be most recent) album Haunted. Lead single "Hey Pretty" was promising, getting to #30 on Billboard's Adult Top-40 radio chart and #13 on Alternative Rock stations, but during that time Atlantic Record was getting overhauled from the big merger with Time Warner and Modern Records and Poe were collateral damage, stopping promotion on the album and cutting her career off. Further legal battles with bad consequences kept Poe from putting out music for years, and she has since not returned with another record, sadly. A true victim of the record business being gutted by "venture capitalists".
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Here's Poe appearing live on Conan O'Brien in 1996...
And lastly, the singer at a club in Los Angeles in 2014...
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