Songoftheday 9/15/21 - When superstars and cannonballs are running through your head, a television freak show cops and robbers everywhere...

 

 

"The Animal Song" - Savage Garden

from the albums The Other Sister (Original Soundtrack) and Affirmation (both 1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 6

 

Today's song comes from the Australian pop duo Savage Garden, whose self-titled debut album churned out three big hits in America with "I Want You", "To The Moon And Back", and "Truly Madly Deeply", the latter of which topped Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the beginning of 1998. A year later, Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones returned with a song they contributed to the soundtrack to the movie The Other Sister, about a young couple (the information from the studio calls them "mentally handicapped", but that is soooooo not the right way to put this) struggles to stay together and make a living. I mean, using teen star actors like Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi to play differently-abled people is, well, a choice, one that would get completely ridiculed today especially with two actors involved with a religion that has some very bad ideas about mental health. Even then, the film didn't even make its money back. As for the soundtrack, the record included songs from the Pretenders, Paula Cole, Joan Osborne, and up and coming Broadway star Idina Menzel. Savage Garden's track was "The Animal Song", written by the pair who co-produced it with Mariah Carey's former go-to Walter Afanasieff. A slight ditty about how living like animals would be easier than the stress and pressure of adult human existence (not mentioning the avoidance of being food, of course), it's a bright and shiny song that unmistakably a movie song, with fleeting references that may or may not have to do with the actual plot of the movie. It's not a horrid tune, but definitely not as memorable as their previous (and future) hits...

Nevertheless, "The Animal Song" returned Savage Garden to the American pop Top-40 in April of 1999. The song also climbed to #20 on Billboard magazine's older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio format chart. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in Australia (#3), Sweden (#3), New Zealand (#3), and Canada (#5), and made the top-40 in Norway (#12), Belgium (#15F), the UK (#18), Ireland (#19), and Iceland (#23). The Other Sister soundtrack, released in February of that year, went to #109 on the Billboard 200 sales tally. Later in 1999, the song was included on their second album Affirmation, which came out in November. The set peaked at #6 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for over a year, going on to move over three million copies. Savage Garden and the Affirmation album will return to the series.

(5/10)

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Here's Hayes, Jones, and the band performing on TV to promote the single...

Next up, live in concert at their peak in Australia...

 

 

...and lastly, Hayes solo at a show in 2011...

 

 

Up tomorrow: A quick-fire rapper and a pop icon come together to ask for a decision.