Songoftheday 4/6/21 - Sailing down behind the sun waiting for my prince to come, praying for the healing rain to restore my soul again...
"My Father's Eyes" - Eric Clapton
from the album Pilgrim (1998)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #16 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 20
Today's song of the day comes from Eric Clapton, who had returned to the pop top ten in America with his Grammy-winning single "Change The World" from the John Travolta movie Phenomenon in the summer of 1996. The year after, the guitarist kept a relatively low musical profile, drawing more headlines for his relationship with musician Sheryl Crow than anything else. In 1998, Clapton returned with his first album in four years, and first mainstream studio release since 1990's Journeyman set, Pilgrim. The lead track promoted to radio was "My Father's Eyes", an adult-pop (or "dad rock") midtempo number written by Eric, who produced it with Simon Climie (of the duo Climie Fisher). Written about his estranged father, who he never met, but the lyrics are a bit too vague for me to have gotten that reference back in the day. It sounded a whole lot like a slightly punchier "Change The World" with a pseudo-reggae beat, which the easy-listening crowd ate up like hotcakes. I guess I felt about this the way a lot of critics felt like Steve Winwood's music...
Since "My Father's Eyes" wasn't released as a commercial single in the U.S., it wasn't able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got enough radio love to make the top-20 on the airplay component of that tally in April of 1998. The song was a huge hit at Adult Contemporary radio, spending a full year on the chart and spending five weeks at #2, while cresting at #7 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. It even made it on to rock radio, on the basis of his name, rising to #26 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. Internationally, the single climbed all the way to #2 in Canada, and reached the top-40 in Iceland (#12), Austria (#18), Norway (#20), Switzerland (#31), and his native Britain (#33). The Pilgrim album, released in March of that year, came in at #4 on the Billboard 200 sales chart in America and #3 in the UK. At the Grammy Awards in 1999, "My Father's Eyes" won the trophy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, while the Pilgrim album was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album, losing out (deservedly) to Madonna for her Ray Of Light set.
The second "single" from Pilgrim, "She's Gone", wasn't released commercially in the US either, but was a little more warmly received at rock radio, where it climbed to #19 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. Meanwhile, in the UK, the song "Circus" was put out as a single, where it made the top-40 at #39. Also, Clapton's cover of Bob Dylan's "Born in Time" was a minor hit in Germany at #88.
In 1999, Clapton again kept a lower profile, with his record company releasing a retrospective and Eric just putting out two singles from movies again. The first, the lite country of "Blue Eyes Blue" from the Julia Roberts vehicle Runaway Bride, was a big "easy listening" hit, going to #4 on Adult Contemporary and #29 at Adult Top-40. Then, from the Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer pairing The Story Of Us, the song "(I) Get Lost" scored the guitarist his sole Dance Club Play hit at #8. It sounds a lot like Everything But The Girl's "Missing", and that's a compliment.
Eric's next studio album release would be a collaborative effort with blues master B.B. King. The result was Riding With The King, which got to #3 on the Billboard 200 sales chart, going on to sell over two million copies, and won the pair a Grammy for Best Blues Album. Also, the title track went to #26 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. A year later, Clapton returned with Reptile, which continued his top-10 album streak in America at #5, while single "Believe In Life" nearly made the Adult Contemporary top ten at #11 in 2001. Two other tracks from the set were up for Grammys in 2002, with the title track and Bossa Nova homage "Reptile" winning for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, and "Superman Inside", his most recent Mainstream Rock radio hit at #21, lost the Best Male Rock Vocal category to Lenny Kravitz's "Dig In".
Since then, Eric has released six more studio albums and two collaborative efforts with J.J. Cale. In 2006, he made the Adult Contemporary top ten at #9 with "Say What You Will" from his Back Home release. His most recent regular radio hit was in 2013, where "Every Little Thing" got to #26 on easy-listening radio, but in 2018 his cover of "White Christmas" from his most recent set Happy Xmas in 2018 peaked at #11 at Adult Contemporary. Clapton also was up for nine more regular Grammy awards, winning the Best Contemporary Blues Album with The Road To Escondido with J.J. Cale in 2008, while getting the Lifetime Achievement Award inn 2006. He's also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times over, once as a solo artist and as a member of Cream and the Yardbirds.
(4/10)
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Here's an early version of "My Father's Eyes" that he performed in the concert where Clapton recorded his Unplugged record...
and lastly, in concert in 2007...
Up tomorrow: Swedish pop legend has romantic stipulations.
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