Songoftheday 6/25/21 - I've spent all my life on a search to find, the love who'll stay for eternity the heaven sent to fulfill my needs...

 

 

"Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" - Deborah Cox

from the album One Wish (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (eight weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 27

 

Today's song of the day comes from Canadian pop/soul singer Deborah Cox, whose debut album had spun off a pair of top-40 pop hits with "Sentimental" and "Who Do U Love", the latter reaching the top-20 in the States in the spring of 1996. The following year, Cox returned with a new song from the movie Money Talks, "Things Just Ain't The Same", which stalled down at #56 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 pop chart, and was a moderate R&B hit at #22. But its biggest success was in the clubs, where a revamped version helped it top the Dance Club Play list for a week. That vocal house music treatment would appear on Cox's second album One Wish in the fall of 1998. The lead single from the sophomore effort was another ballad, "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here". Written by producer Shep Crawford with successful recording artist in his own right, Montell Jordan, the song has Deborah as a woman who has been hurt too many times and has given up on love, only to find the next potential heartbreaker just around the bend. Pleading that she thought she's locked herself down for good, Cox exclaims with that question "How did you get here?" which leads to the title. As a ballad, it's a smooth slice of adult soul that proved to be a huge magnet at urban radio stations...

Pop radio didn't really bite on this one. But like her earlier singles, "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" was transformed into a club anthem by the likes of Hex Hector, whose version strips all the lite gospel production from the song and turns it into the gay booty-shaking anthem everyone needed at that time...

Sales of the single, which included the mixes, skyrocketed, helping Cox spend two months in the runner-up position on the official Billboard magazine Hot 100 pop chart starting in December of 1998. Meanwhile, the ballad version was solid on urban radio, making "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" break the record for most weeks at #1 on Billboard R&B at fourteen. The dance version also topped the Dance Club Play list for a week. Internationally, the single surprisingly didn't fare as well, only climbing to #21 in her native Canada, and only being a minor hit in Germany (#51), the UK (#55), and the Netherlands (#84). The One Wish album, released in September of that year, stalled out at #72 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, but stayed on for almost a year, eventually selling over a half million copies in the U.S.. Deborah will be back on this series.

Slow Version: (7/10)    Fast Version: (10/10)

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Here's Cox appearing on the Donny & Marie talk show to perform the ballad version...

Next up, doing the dance version for Canadian TV...

And lastly, for Arista Records' 25th Anniversary Concert in 2005, where she transitions from the ballad to the club version...

Up tomorrow: Late R&B singer is asking for identification.