Songoftheday 4/15/21 - Cinderella said to Snow White how does love get so off course, all I wanted was a white knight with a good heart soft touch fast horse...

 

 

"This Kiss" - Faith Hill

from the album Faith (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #7 (four weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 37

 

Today's song of the day comes from country music singer Faith Hill, who grew up Aubrey Perry in Mississippi before moving to Nashville to pursue her dreams. Marrying music biz exec Daniel Hill (hence gaining that surname), she toiled in the town before finally securing a record contract with Warner Brothers Records. Faith released her debut album Take Me As I Am in 1993, and from it her first two singles, "Wild One" and a cover of Janis Joplin's "Piece Of My Heart", went to #1 on Billboard magazine's country chart. The album went to #59 on the Billboard 200 sales chart, and stayed on the list for over a year, outlasting her marriage to Hill. In 1995, Faith returned with her sophomore effort, It Matters To Me, which was her first to reach the top-40 at #29. The second single from the set, title track "It Matters To Me", returned Faith to #1 on the Country Songs chart and landed her first hit on Billboard's official Hot 100 pop chart at #74, and five songs from the record reached the top ten on the Country Songs chart. 

Faith met her second husband, country star Tim McGraw, when they were touring together. In the summer of 1997, she joined Tim on the ballad "It's Your Love", which went to #7 on the pop chart, and #1 on the Country Songs list for an amazing six weeks. After a three year break where Tim and Faith started a family, Hill returned with her third release Faith. The lead single, "This Kiss", was written by critics darling Beth Nielsen Chapman along with Robin Lerner and Annie Roboff, and produced by Faith with Byron Gallimore. It has the twangy guitars of country music, but the song was so bright and cheery that it attracted adult-leaning pop stations like honey to bears. The lyrics were pretty basic in the trying to find a needle in the romantic haystack vein, but Faith's voice sells it better than most country singers could, and suddenly she found herself with another cross-format hit. And the chorus, with its "centrifugal force" tag, had so much early-90s Amy Grant in it...

"This Kiss" became Faith Hill's second top ten pop hit, and first solo one, in October of 1998. The song took three weeks at #1 on Billboard's Country Songs chart, and was a big hit on "easy listening" radio, spending three weeks at #3 on the Adult Contemporary radio chart, and peaking at #14 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format tally. Internationally, the single went to #24 in Canada, and even translated overseas, going to #4 in Australia and making the top-40 in the UK (#13), Austria (#18), and Sweden (#22). The Faith album, released in April of that year, rose to #7 on the Billboard 200, and #2 on the Country Albums list, going on to move over four million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 1999, "This Kiss" was nominated for Best Female Country Performance, losing out to an even hotter Shania Twain for "You're Still The One". The Faith album was also up for the Best Country Album award, which went home with the Dixie Chicks for their Wide Open Spaces opus. 

(8/10)

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Here's Faith performing "This Kiss" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1998...

Next up at an awards show in 1999...

And lastly, the song a little shaken and stirred for her When The Lights Go Down concert DVD in 2003...

Up tomorrow: Another fledgling singer from Down Under's Neighbors gets ripped apart.