Robbed hit of the week 11/22/21 - Faith Hill's "The Secret Of Life"...

 

 

"The Secret Of Life" - Faith Hill

from the album Faith (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #46 

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from country music singer Faith Hill, whose third album Faith broke her into the mainstream pop market, scoring a top ten hit with "This Kiss" as well as a top-40 follow-up on "Let Me Let Go".  She also had a top-3 country radio hit with her husband Tim McGraw on "Just To Hear You Say You Love Me", and the fourth single from the album, "Love Ain't Like That", went to #12 on the Country Singles chart and #68 on the crossover Hot 100 in Billboard magazine. 

The fifth and final single from the record was "The Secret Of Life", written by Gretchen Peters and produced by Hill with Byron Gallimore. The song has a conversational tone more associated with alternative rock in those days, and Peters is adept in telling a story, where a weathered bartender watches over a jaded set of guys who are talking about their place in life. It's a precursor to the "list songs" that infected the genre much later on, but Peters tries to make it more than that, and Hill is such a good interpreter that she seems like a chorus (like in Greek theatre) giving the play by play and the moral of the story, that it's the little things that make life worth it. It almost seems like a sequel to Don Henley's "The End Of The Innocence", though the landing end line in "The secret of life is nothin' at all", which is almost a little deflating, if it didn't circle around to the beginning of the lyrics...

While "The Secret Of Life" returned Faith to the Country Singles top ten at #4, the song stopped just short of the Hot 100 crossover top-40 in September of 1999. Internationally, the single got to #2 on the Canadian Country Chart. 

 

(6/10)