Songoftheday 8/5/20 - Something in me just won't give me a chance, I think it's that I feel more confused by the deal love has shown me...

"I Go Blind" - Hootie & The Blowfish

from the album Friends (Music From the TV Series) (1995)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #13 (one week)

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 30

Today's song of the day comes from the pop/rock band from South Carolina, Hootie & The Blowfish, whose second album Fairweather Johnson went to #1 but was a relative disappointment on the charts, landing two top-40 pop singles that missed the top ten tier with "Old Man & Me" and "Tucker's Town". But during the promotion of that record, radio stations started to play a track that originally was a B-side to their first hit "Hold My Mind" back in 1994 and used for the soundtrack of the wildly popular TV sitcom Friends. "I Go Blind" was a cover of an obscure indie-rock nugget from Canadian band 54-40. Written by that group's Phil Comparelli, Brad Merritt, Darryl Neudorf, and Neil Osbourne, the mid-tempo song didn't even make the charts in that country, with the album just coming in at #91 there in 1986, but it was a college radio favorite, and Hootie's version eventually found so much favor that it ended up overshadowing anything on that second disc, and almost as popular as the Friends theme song "I'll Be There For You" from the Rembrandts, also a big radio hit...

Since Hootie's "I Go Blind" wasn't released as a proper single (although you could say that they could have let "Hold My Hand"/"I Go Blind" re-enter the chart), the song wasn't able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However the song got so much radio love that it spent almost eight months on the airplay component of the tally, cresting in the top 20 in December of 1996. The song spent an entire year on Billboard's Adult Top-40 format chart, spending a week at #3, while getting to #22 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list. Internationally, the single got to #13 in Canada.

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Here's the original version of "I Go Blind" recorded by the Canadian band 54-40 in 1986...

And lastly, Hootie & The Blowfish in concert in 2017...

Up tomorrow: Shakespeare goes to the "trash".