Songoftheday 9/18/20 - I know it's better when the rhythm works together with the beat in your soul...

 

 

"Request Line" - Zhané

from the album Saturday Night (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #39 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 2

 

Today's song of the day comes from the neo-soul duo Zhané, who after selling over a million copies of their debut album, landed a fourth top-40 pop hit with a rework of the disco classic "Shame" from the movie A Low Down Dirty Shame at the close of 1994. Two and a half years later Renee Neufville and Jean Norris returned with their sophomore effort Saturday Night. The lead single was the smooth funk of "Request Line", written by Neufville, producer Kay-Gee, and Darren Lighty over a sample of Ashford & Simpson's "It Seems To Hang On". The track did well at urban radio, and again crossed over to mainstream stations...

"Request Line" became Zhané's fifth and final top-40 pop hit in March of 1997. The song landed a fourth top ten R&B hit at #9 as well. Internationally, the single peaked at #12 in New Zealand, and was the duo's biggest hit in the UK, cresting at #22. The Saturday Night album just missed the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales chart at #41.

The title track from the album, "Saturday Night", wasn't released as a single, but it got enough urban radio airplay to place on Billboard magazine's R&B Airplay chart for a week at #69 in May of 1997. A month later, a second commercial single, "Crush", was released, which got to #24 on the R&B chart while "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #106 (it just missed the British Top-40 at #44). Afterwards the pair were featured on Naughty By Nature's top ten hit "Jamboree" in 1999 before they went their separate ways, with Norris joining up with her husband Marcus Taylor for The Baylor Project, who nabbed a pair of Grammy nominations in 2017. 

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Here's Renee and Jean appearing live on TV in 1997...

Up tomorrow: A rising star find a pretty rare match.