Songoftheday 6/6/21 - I could stay awake just to hear you breathing, watch you smile while you are sleeping while you're far away and dreaming...

 

 

"I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" - Aerosmith

from the album Armageddon: The Album (Original Soundtrack) (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (four week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 14

 

Today's song of the day comes from the long-standing blues-rock band Aerosmith, whose first album after their mega-millions comeback to Columbia Records, Nine Lives, didn't match the huge success of their run of records with Geffen, but still scored a pair of top-40 pop hits with "Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)" and the Grammy-winning "Pink". During the time they were touring behind that album, where both lead singer Steven Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer were injured, Aerosmith contributed two new and two old songs to the sci-fi disaster movie Armageddon starring Bruce Willis and Tyler's daughter Liv. One of the new ones was a power-ballad written by song doctor supreme Diane Warren. "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing", produced by Matt Serletic, who was getting hot with his work with Matchbox 20, sounded like nothing the band had done before, even with Tyler's trademark rough growling. It really had more in common with Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" than their own "Dream On". But somehow this didn't put off their fanbase, and along with the massive success of the movie the song ended up the highest charting single of their career, as Tyler just hit the 50 year old mark...

 

 "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" became Aerosmith's sole #1 pop hit in America in September of 1998. The song was their first to chart on "easy listening" radio, spending five weeks at #2 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format and hitting #13 on the Adult Contemporary list. Even so, it also rose to #4 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the single topped the charts in Australia, Austria, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland, while reaching the top ten in Canada (#2), Sweden (#2), the Netherlands (#3), Belgium (#3F/#4W), Finland (#3), the UK (#4), Spain (#4), France (#8), and Denmark (#8). The Armageddon: The Album tie-in, released in June of that year, spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally in America, spending over a year on the list and going on to move over four million copies. At the Academy Awards, "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" was nominated for best original song, which went to the Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston megaduet "When You Believe" from Prince Of Egypt. The song also got a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance (their first and only "pop" nom), which went to the Brian Setzer Orchestra's neo-swing revival "Jump Jive & Wail". 

The other "new" Aerosmith song from the album, the uptempo "What Kind Of Love Are You On", wasn't released as a single, but got enough spins on rock radio to reach #4 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock airplay chart. 

(6/10)

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Here's the band performing the song at the Academy Awards in 1999...

Only a couple months after the hit movie version, country singer Mark Chestnutt released a cover of the song as the first single and title track from his eighth studio album. The result went to #1 on the Country Songs chart and climbed to #17 on Billboard's Hot 100 pop tally (it will be a near future SOTD)...

And lastly, Aerosmith live in concert in 2004..

Up tomorrow: Soul singer is pondering.