Robbed hit of the week 11/9/20 - "Shame On You" from the Indigo Girls...
"Shame On You" - Indigo Girls
from the album Shaming Of The Sun (1997)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #42 (two weeks)
This week's "robbed hit" comes from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls, who had sold over two million copies of their heralded self-titled second album and scored a minor pop hit with the song "Closer To Fine" in the summer of 1989. Emily Saliers and Amy Ray returned a year later with Nomads Indians and Saints; the big single from the set, "Hammer and Nail", was an even bigger hit on rock radio, peaking at #12 on the Alternative Rock list in Billboard magazine, but it failed to make the pop list at all. The pair recovered a bit with their next record, Rites Of Passage, which sold over a million and scored their biggest Alternative Rock radio hit with the thoughtful pro-science piece "Galileo", which got to #10 there and made the pop Hot 100 at #89. In 1994, they were rewarded with their first top ten album with Swamp Ophelia (#9), with another minor rock radio hit with "Least Complicated", which went to #28 at Alternative Rock radio and was their sole charting single in the UK with a week at #98. That was followed by a live double-album, 1200 Curfews, which did really well, scratching the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales list at #40.
In 1997, the Girls released their sixth studio effort Shaming Of The Sun. Produced by the duo with David Leonard, the record was more lush and nuanced than the folksy yet accessible material from their past. The lead single, "Shame On You" which was written by Ray, was the most "Indigo"-sounding track of the bunch, and radio, especially the newer "Adult Top-40" format stations, took very kindly to the jangle-pop song...
Since "Shame On You" wasn't released as a commercial single (most likely to goose sales of the album), it wasn't able to place on Billboard's official pop Hot 100 chart. However, the song got enough radio love to come a couple of notches from making the top-40 on the airplay component of the tally in July of 1997. The single spent a half-year on Billboard's Adult Top-40 radio list, peaking at #15, while going all the way to #3 on their Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple-A") format chart. The Shaming Of The Sun album was their highest-ranked set at #7. At the Grammy Awards in 1998, the record was nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album, losing out to Bob Dylan for his Time Out Of Mind release.
While no other songs from Shaming Of The Sun reached the pop or rock radio charts in Billboard, another track from the set, "Shed Your Skin", was transformed by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello into a rock-club banger, and went to #36 on the Dance Club Play chart in 1998.
Amy and Emily came back in 1999 with their next record Come On Now Social. Lead single "Peace Tonight" nicked the Adult Top-40 list at #40, their most recent hit there, and #4 on the Triple-A format. In 2004, the pair matched their best showing at Triple-A at #3 with "Perfect World". They would rack up three more hits at that format, the most recent being "What Are You Like" from their Poseidon and the Bitter Bug (their first on Vanguard Records), which went to #11 in 2009. Since then they've released four more studio albums including a holiday set, the most recent being Look Long on the bluegrass label Rounder in May of 2020, which peaked at #159 on the Billboard 200.
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