Robbed hit of the week 1/10/22 - Melissa Etheridge's "Angels Would Fall"...

 

 

"Angels Would Fall" - Melissa Etheridge

from the album Breakdown (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #51 (three weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from rock artist Melissa Etheridge,  whose fifth studio album Your Little Secret was the highest-charting record of her career in 1995, and spun off two top-40 pop hits with "I Want To Come Over" and "Nowhere To Go". Four years later, Melissa would return with her sixth effort Breakdown, a much darker and personal piece than her previous Springsteen-esque work. The lead single from the project was "Angels Would Fall", written and produced by Etheridge with John Shanks. Melissa relays the lonely pain she feels in a broken relationship, as she pines for the unobtainable love of yet another woman. The songs sense of suffocation of her emotions and navigating the line between friendship and passion make this one of her most complex singles of that time. But the musical backdrop isn't dour, but rather driving, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Joan Osborne's "One Of Us"...

While "Angels Would Fall" topped Billboard magazine's Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple A") Rock radio chart for three weeks, and peaked at #9 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list, the single stopped right under the halfway mark on the pop Hot 100 singles chart in America in October of 1999. Internationally, the single was a top ten hit in Canada at #6. The Breakdown album, released in October of that year as "Angels" was peaking, rose to #12 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a half million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "Angels Would Fall" was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, losing out to Sheryl Crow for her cover of "Sweet Child O' Mine", while the Breakdown album was also up for Best Rock Album, which Santana took home for their comeback Supernatural record. 

The second single from the album, "Enough Of Me" went to #19 on Billboard's Adult Top-40 chart. The song was nominated for the Best Female Rock Vocal Performance Grammy a year later, losing again to Sheryl Crow for her live version of "There Goes The Neighborhood" (in my opinion, both are "ringer" noms that really shouldn't have been there but were there to put Crow on the list). 

(8/10)

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Here's Melissa doing a daytime TV appearance to promote the album...

Next up, an acoustic take from a local televised radio concert...

 

 and lastly, in concert in 2004...