Songoftheday 9/6/20 - What's the deal I wanna know is this love for real, or could it be lust that I feel...

 

 

"Big Daddy" - Heavy D

from the album Waterbed Hev (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #18 (four weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 12

 

Today's song of the day comes from rapper Heavy D, whose fifth album (with "The Boyz"), Nuttin' But Love, spun off two top-40 pop hits with "Got Me Waiting" and "Nuttin' But Love", the latter in the fall of 1993.  After a long break which saw Dwight Myers concentrating on the other side of the music business as the head of Uptown Records, Heavy D returned in 1997 with his first album dropping "The Boyz" as a solo artist, Waterbed Hev. The lead single from the set was "Big Daddy", which had him laying verses over a sample of Soul II Soul's 1989 classic "Back To Life"...

"Big Daddy" became Heavy D's fifth and final top-40 pop hit in March of 1997. The song also climbed to #5 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart. Internationally, the single went to #45 in New Zealand. The next song promoted to radio, "Keep It Comin'", went to #46 on the R&B Airplay list (it wasn't eligible for the official chart). That was followed by the Hall & Oates-sampling radio-only single "I'll Do Anything", which climbed to #65 on the R&B Airplay chart. The Waterbed Hev album was the highest-ranked set in his career, making the top ten on both the Billboard 200 at #9 and the R&B Albums list at #3. 

In 1999, Myers returned with Heavy, which had tons of A-list guest stars like Cee-Lo, Q-Tip, and Erick Sermon, but stalled down at #60 on the albums chart with no hit singles to brag of. Uptown folded into Universal Records that year, and it would be almost a decade for the rapper to reemerge on indie print Stride with Vibes in 2008. His final set, Love Opus, arrived in 2011, and slipped on to the R&B Albums list at #75. However, tragedy hit when Myers was found dead of a blood clot after performing at a Michael Jackson tribute in London (from the long plane ride back to California - remember you need to walk on those flights). 

Up tomorrow: British soulster is new, but coming back.