Songoftheday 11/11/20 - I know some times can get rough but we'll make it, we'll make it through the storm and I know I will try...

 

 

"I Can Love You" - Mary J. Blige featuring Lil' Kim

from the album Share My World (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 6

 

Today's song of the day comes from R&B icon Mary J. Blige, who scored a massive pop/R&B hit in the beginning of 1996 with her ballad "Not Gon' Cry" from the Whitney Houston movie Waiting To Exhale.  However, the rest of the year had her pretty quiet, with only a contribution to the 1996 Olympic Summer Games companion album, a cover of Rufus & Chaka Khan's "Everlasting Love", becoming a minor R&B Airplay hit (#47). Breaking up professionally with former label head Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, and romantically with Jodeci's K-Ci Hailey, Blige also tackled her drug and alcohol problems that year. In the spring of 1997, Blige returned with the lead single from her upcoming third album Share My World (well, second if you count "Not Gon' Cry" which is also on the disc), the lush, positive "Love Is All We Need". Not released as a commercial single (most likely to goose up sales of the new album), the song climbed to #5 on Billboard magazine's R&B Airplay chart, but stalled right under the pop Hot 100 Airplay list at #43. (It was Mary's second #1 Dance Club Play hit as well). Mary and her label (now MCA who usurped Uptown) rectified that in the summer by putting that song as the "B-Side" of her next physical single release "I Can Love You". The new song, written by Blige with producer Rodney Jerkins, Carlos Broady, Nashiem Myrick, and rapper Lil' Kim, who provides a rap cameo on the album version, was a midtempo track that bragged about her romantic abilities, all over a beat not unlike those of SWV and Total...

"I Can Love You" returned Blige to the American pop top-40 in August of 1997. The song spent a week at #2 on Billboard's R&B chart. Internationally, the song wasn't released as a single. The Share My World album, released in April of that year, became Mary's first #1 album on the Billboard 200 sales chart, going on the sell over three million copies. At the 1998 Grammy Awards, the set was nominated for Best R&B Album, losing out to Erykah Badu's debut Baduism.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's the "B-side" of the single, "Love Is All We Need", which technically would have been listed but the airplay had already way passsed on that one...

Next up is Mary appearing on the Jamie Foxx sitcom in 1997...

and live on a TV appearance to promote the album...

and lastly, in concert in 2004 with Lil Kim...

Up tomorrow: "Rich" Kiwis contemplate strangeness.