Songoftheday 10/30/21 - I looked into your eyes and my world came tumblin' down, you're the devil in disguise yhat's why I'm singin' this song...

 

 

"Beautiful Stranger" - Madonna

from the album Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Original Soundtrack) (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 9

 

Today's song is from Madonna, whose seventh album Ray Of Light was a renaissance in her career both professionally and musically, winning three Grammy Awards and spinning off three top-40 pop hits with "Frozen", "Ray Of Light", and "The Power Of Good-bye", with the latter just missing joining the other two in the top ten in the autumn of 1998. The following year, the pop icon contributed a song to the soundtrack to the sequel to Mike Myers' hit movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. "Beautiful Stranger", written and produced by Madonna with William Orbit, straddled the gap between being retro-psuedo-psychedelic 60's pastiche and electronica from the end of the millennium. The lyrics harken back to the simple love language of pop music in the Summer Of Love era, with Byrd-like guitar arpeggios and club-ready synths gelling into each other to make a trippy fun piece of fluff, with the "da da da's" at the end of the chorus driving home the nostalgia. And of course Myers has to show up in the video in his Austin Powers character, proving Madonna hasn't totally lost her sense of humor...

Even without any sales of a physical commercial "single", "Beautiful Stranger" made it to the top 20 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 pop chart in July of 1999. The song also appeared on both the older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio chart at #9 and the "easy listening" Adult Contemporary format list at #21. The remixes of the song done by DJ Victor Calderone helped the track spend two weeks at #1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart. Internationally, the single topped the charts in Canada, Italy, Finland, and Iceland, and reached the top ten in the UK (#2), Hungary (#2), Ireland (#3), Greece (#3), Spain (#4), Denmark (#4), Australia (#5), New Zealand (#5), the Netherlands (#6), Switzerland (#6), and Norway (#8). The Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack, released in June of that year, went all the way to #5 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies and inspire a second volume of songs from the film that October, which made it to #145 on the albums chart. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "Beautiful Stranger" won for Best Original Song from Visual Media, and was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, losing to Sarah McLachlan for her live rendition of "I Will Remember You". 

The soundtrack, which also included cuts from Green Day, Mel B from the Spice Girls, and R.E.M. as well as oldies from the Who and Quincy Jones, produced another minor pop hit with Lenny Kravitz's cover of the Guess Who's "American Woman". Lenny's take went to #49 on the Hot 100, while reaching the top ten on both the Mainstream (#3) and Alternative (#7) rock radio charts, and #23 at the Adult Top-40 format. His performance did win a Grammy the same year as Madonna for Best Male Rock Vocal. 

Madonna will be back to the series, courtesy of yet another movie. 

(6/10)

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Here's the tribal house reconstruction of "Beautiful Stanger" done by Victor Calderone that got the song to #1 for two weeks on Billboard's dance chart...

 

 Next up, live in concert on her Drowned World Tour in 2001...

Up tomorrow: Texan-born country band crossover all the way to the top.