Songoftheday 8/4/21 - Spend all your time waiting For that second chance for a break that would make it okay, there's always some reason to feel not good enough and it's hard at the end of the day...

 

 

"Angel" - Sarah McLachlan

from the album Surfacing (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 27

 

Today's song comes from Canadian singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan, whose fourth album Surfacing had already landed three pop hits with "Building A Mystery", "Sweet Surrender", and "Adia", with the latter reaching the top ten in the summer of 1998. The fourth release from the record would be the stark ballad "Angel". Written by McLachlan and produced by Pierre Marchand, the song mourns the tragic overdose death of Jonathan Melvoin of the Smashing Pumpkins in 1996. With only her piano and a bass (from the Barenaked Ladies' Jim Creggan), Sarah sounds sad but calming at the same time as she illustrates the sorrow and loneliness that makes some turn to heroin. Her delicate rendition connected with her audience greatly, as it followed "Adia" into the pop top ten in America as the future song that launched a thousand tearful ASPCA commercials was born...

 

 "Angel" became McLachlan's second and so-far last top ten pop hit in the U.S. in March of 1998. The single was huge on "easy listening" radio, spending twelve weeks atop Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary radio chart, and taking seven weeks at #1 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Canada (#7) and Norway (#9), as well as in Ireland at #7 in 2002 thanks to a remix. It also reached the top-40 in Austria (#17), Switzerland (#17), the Netherlands (#31), New Zealand (#36), and the UK (#36), the latter again due to a remix in 2002. 

Although there were no more singles released from Surfacing, a set of remixes of the album track "I Love You" were serviced to DJ's, and it climbed to #23 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart in 2000. Sarah will be back to this series.

 

(10/10)

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Here's Sarah performing "Angel" live in concert with just her piano...

This is the "Dusted Remix" by Rollo Armstrong of the group Faithless and Mark Bates that went to #7 in Ireland and #36 in the UK in 2002...

Sarah performed "Angel" with Carlos Santana in his TV concert in 2000...

Lastly, at home in 2013...

Up tomorrow: Boy-band gets a tad religious with their romance.