Songoftheday 11/21/21 - Lying here with you listening to the rain, smiling just to see the smile upon your face...
"I Could Not Ask For More" - Edwin McCain
from the albums Messenger and Message In A Bottle (Original Soundtrack) (both 1999)
Billboard Hot 100 peak; #37 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 3
Today's song comes from alternative rock singer Edwin McCain, who scored a top ten pop hit in the fall of 1998 with "I'll Be". That song he wrote himself, but when it came time to release his third album Messenger, the lead single would be one written by the biggest "song doctor" of the modern rock era. "I Could Not Ask For More" was written by Diane Warren, and produced by Matt Serletic (of Matchbox 20 fame) and Noel Golden. A love ballad that has wedding-dance lyrics about how happy they are to be with the person, and really gives me the "this really isn't Bryan Adams singing this?" vibes. Of course in Warren fashion its all about the sweeping chorus, where the strings and production swells in to flooding proportions. All the while McCain is straining to keep up with the sound level. The song did get a boost being in the Kevin Costner movie Message In A Bottle, appearing on its soundtrack as well...
"I Could Not Ask For More" became Edwin's second and so far last top-40 pop hit on the Hot 100 in August of 1999. The song was a big hit on "easy listening" radio, spending two weeks at #3 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contempoary chart (and staying on there for over a year), and peaked at #6 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio format list. Internationally, the single rose to #12 in Canada. The Messenger album, released in June of that year, scored McCain's highest rank on the Billboard 200 sales tally at #59, going on to sell over a half million copies. The Message In A Bottle soundtrack, which came out that February, made the top-40 on the Billboard 200 at #39, not a bad placing for a mid-level film.
Edwin's follow-up single from the album, "Go Be Young", was his own composition. The waltz-power-ballad got to #29 on the Adult Top-40 format, but missed the pop Hot 100 altogether.
The singer/songwriter returned in 2001 with his last album on Lava/Atlantic Records, Far From Over. The first single from the set, "Hearts Fall", was a minor Adult Contemporary radio hit at #27, while the album reached #105 on the Billboard 200. Since then, Edwin has released six full-length studio albums on various independent labels, with 2004's Scream & Whisper doing the best, spending a week on the Billboard 200 at #183. His most recent album, Merry Christmas Baby, came out in 2019. In 2020, McCain released a new song, "We're All In This Together", inspired by the coronavirus pandemic.
(4/10)
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Edwin performing the song on The Tonight Show...
In 2001, country singer Sara Evans covered "I Could Not Ask For More" for her Born To Fly album. Not only did she end up doing better on the Hot 100 than Edwin, going to #34, but totally eclipsing his version with one of the best vocal performances of her career, which suit the song's power-ballad roots so much better.
Up tomorrow: A nutritional singer is grinning.
Comments