Songoftheday 8/2/21 - Shoulda known it was you knockin' on my door, at half past a heartache at quarter to four...

 

 

"You're Easy On The Eyes" - Terri Clark

from the album How I Feel (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #40 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 1

 

Today's song of the day comes from Canadian country singer/guitarist/songwriter Terri Clark, who was born in Montreal but spent her formative years in the rural province of Alberta. Her maternal grandparents and her mother were musicians in her homeland, and eventually Terri moved to Nashville to start her own career. One of her early boasters, producer Keith Stegall, ended up running Mercury Records there and signed Clark to the label. Her self-titled debut album was released in 1995, with lead single "Better Things To Do" landing up at #3 on Billboard magazine's Country Songs chart. That was followed by "When Boy Meets Girl", which followed it up to #3 on the Country list for two weeks, while "bubbling under" Billboard's pop Hot 100 at #122. The third offering, the ballad "If I Were You", topped the country chart in Canada, and landed her third top ten country hit in America at #8. The Terri Clark album climbed to #13 on the Country Albums chart, and #79 on the Billboard 200 all-genre sales tally in the U.S., and went on to sell over a million copies. 

A year later, Clark returned with her sophomore effort Just The Same, a nod to the fact that it sounded damn near identical to her debut (which isn't a bad thing per se). It spawned another pair of top ten country hits in America that topped the country list in Canada, including a cover of Linda Ronstadt's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (#5 US Country). The album reached the Country Albums top ten at #10, and again sold over a million. She was also nominated for a Grammy Award for her part in the multi-multi-artist collab "Hope: Country Music's Quest For A Cure", which went to Vince Gill and Alison Krauss' "High Lonesome Sound" (a rare time a nominee with a truckload of artists didn't vote themselves in). 

In 1998, Terri was back with her third release How I Feel. The lead single changed the tempo as going with the tenderly beautiful ballad "Now That I Found You". The song spent a couple weeks at #2 on the Country Songs chart in both the U.S. and Canada, and was her first to appear on Billboard's Hot 100 at #72, since it was released as a commercially available single. The next song from the set promoted to radio wasn't, but benefited from the music business bible changing the chart rules in December of 1998 to allow album tracks to place on the weekly tally. "You're Easy On The Eyes", written by Clark with Tom Shapiro and Chris Waters, goes back to her uptempo twostep-friendly wheelhouse, with Terri singing about a guy who is stunning but is a heartbreaker. Despite that, her sunny and strong vocals keep things light, as she falls for the lothario's charms over and over again. The music video turns things around as Clark and a group of enthusiastic ladies audition a slew of men of all types for what musical or stripper position I'm not really sure of...

"You're Easy On The Eyes" became Clark's first song to reach the top 40 on Billboard's Hot 100 in December of 1998. It also was her first to top their Country Songs chart, spending three weeks at the summit. Internationally, the song also went to #1 in her native Canada. The How I Feel album, released in May of 1998, climbed to #70 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #10 on the Country Albums list, and was her third straight disc to sell over a million copies.

Terri followed up this success with "Everytime I Cry", which was another uptempo number with a tearful subject. It stopped just short of the top ten on the Country Songs chart at #12, while going to #69 on the Hot 100. Lastly, the album closer "Unsung Hero", co-written by former SOTD artist Tina Arena, was a minor country hit at #47. Terri will be back to the series in time, though. 

(7/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's Terri appearing on the TNN cable channel to perform the song...

Next up, here she is at the Canadian Country Music Awards in 1998...

Up tomorrow: The British group that took the world by storm just a couple years prior bid adieu (temporarily).