Songoftheday 11/18/21 - She don't care about my big screen or my collection of DVD's, things like that just never mattered much to her plus she don't watch too much TV...

 

 

"Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)" - Blessid Union Of Souls

from the album Walking Off The Buzz (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #33 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 4

 

Today's song comes from the pop band Blessid Union Of Souls, who scored their third top-40 hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the summer of 1997 with "I Wanna Be There".  Two years later, the multi-racial multi-genre group returned with their third album Walking Off The Buzz. The lead single from the set, "Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)", was written by lead singer Eliot Sloan and guitarist Jeff Pence along with producer Emosia. While it was a big change in sound, with the electric guitar amps turned up more than anything I had heard from them in the past, the lyrics still were about geeky love, with Eliot boasting about the love of his girlfriend. All this while going on a name-check exercise (between this and LFO's "Summer Girls" it must've been a thing in 1999), specifically calling out Leonardo DiCaprio, of which he says she wouldn't care if he hung with him (I kind of guess maybe not). It's corny, deliberately corny, well executed, but your usual straight-laced "manly" love song...

 

 "Hey Leonardo" became the Blessid Union Of Souls' fourth and final top-40 pop hit in September of 1999. The song spent a half year (26 weeks) on Billboard's older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio format list as well. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in Canada (#7) and Iceland (#8), while making the top-40 in Australia at #17. The Walking Off The Buzz album, released in April of that year, peaked at #143 on the Billboard 200 sales tally. 

A second single from the record, "Standing On The Edge Of The Earth", climbed to #35 on the Mainstream Top-40 radio chart, but missed the Hot 100. A Greatest hits album followed in 2001, going to #178 on the Billboard 200. 

Since then, the group has released three more studio albums independently, the most recent being Christian-religious record The Mission Field in 2011. At the beginning of this year, they put out Home 25, a collection of live cuts, b-Sides and demos. They also put out a new single, "Smile" in 2021 as well.

(5/10)

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Here's the group doing an in-studio live version of "Hey Leonardo"...

and lastly a concert take from this year...

Up tomorrow: R&B singer is eschewing the emphasis.