Songoftheday 6/29/21 - Your heart is not open so I must go, the spell has been broken I loved you so...

 

 

"The Power Of Good-bye" - Madonna

from the album Ray Of Light (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #11 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 10

 

Today's song of the day is from Madonna, whose renaissance album Ray Of Light had scored a pair of top ten pop hits with "Frozen" and the Grammy-winning title track "Ray Of Light", the latter in the summer of 1998. Later in the summer, she released the ethereal track "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" everywhere but America, and it was a big international success, going to #1 in Spain, and reaching the top ten in the UK, Italy, Belgium, Iceland, and Hungary. The "B-side" of that single, "Sky Fits Heaven", was remixed for the dance clubs, and as a promo only release blipped on to Billboard magazine's Dance Club Play chart at #41. The third retail single release from Ray Of Life in America, and the fourth elsewhere, was another downtempo number, "The Power Of Good-bye". Written by Madonna with prolific pop songwriter Rick Nowels (Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is A Place On Earth"), and produced with William Orbit and Patrick Leonard (covering both the electronica and the dance-pop realms), the song find Madonna at the end of a relationship, with a zen attitude (fitting the album theme) and a resolve in her words that perhaps her vocals let on her emotion about the matter. The result is an older, wiser sequel to "Live To Tell"...

"The Power Of Good-Bye" came one notch away from the pop top ten in America in November of 1998. The song climbed to #14 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, while taking a week at #40 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Spain (#2), Iceland (#2), Sweden (#3), Germany (#4), Austria (#4), Finland (#4), Hungary (#6), the Netherlands (#7), and Switzerland (#8), as well as #6 in the UK listed with the B-side "Little Star". 

 

A fourth American/fifth international single, "Nothing Really Matters", brought Madonna back to the club world, topping Billboard's dance chart for two weeks, and going top ten in Canada (#7), Finland (#6), Greece (#5), Hungary (#1), Iceland (#5), New Zealand (#7), Spain (#1), and the UK (#7). However the single was sorely underappreciated in the States, stalling way down at #93 (though it went to #25 on the pop radio chart, the rule change allowing album tracks really hurt it).  Madonna will of course return to this series a bunch more times.

(7/10)

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Madonna never performed this in her regular tour dates, but did perform the song with a children's choir on the VH1 Fashion Awards...

Up tomorrow: A soul Guy describes his loving technique.