Robbed hit of the week 3/1/21 - Bryan Adams' "Back To You"...

 

 

"Back To You" - Bryan Adams

from the album MTV Unplugged (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #42

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams,  who like many of the mainstream names of the 1980s that had settled down to a more softer adult sound, was having a relatively rough go in America in the late 1990s. His 1996 album 18 Til I Die managed to scrounge just one modest top-40 hit with "Let's Make A Night To Remember" in the fall of that year. That was followed a couple months later by a more successful single, his duet with Barbra Streisand on "I Finally Found Someone" which reached the top ten that December. The following year, Adams released a live album taped for an episode of MTV Unplugged. Covering the span of his career, the television concert included three new songs. One of them, "Back To You", was released as the lead single from the record. Written by Bryan with Eliot Kennedy, who usually writes for more younger pop artists like the Spice Girls and Mary J. Blige, the uptempo track attempted to recreate his more hungry years but more organically with the semi-acoustic production...

While "Back To You" didn't do terribly on the radio, reaching #19 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Top-40 radio chart, the single didn't sell, and it stalled right under the top-40 on their official Hot 100 pop chart in January of 1998. The song did better at "easy listening" stations, making it to #14 on their Adult Contemporary chart and #27 on the older-skewing "Adult Top-40" list. It did manage to pop on to the Mainstream Rock radio chart for his final time at #38. Internationally, the single did very well in his native Canada, spending three non-consecutive weeks at #1, while also making the top ten in Belgium (#3F) and Hungary (#4), while topping out at #18 in the UK. The MTV Unplugged album, which got to #10 in Canada, stopped at #88 in the U.S..

A second release from the live record, "I'm Ready" (a string-filled re-imagination of a song from his breakthrough album Cuts Like A Knife from 1983), just missed the top ten in Canada at #11, while placing in the top-40 in the UK (#20) and the Netherlands (#24).

(5/10)

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Here's Bryan appearing on Letterman to promote the record...

and lastly, live at Live 8 in 2005...