Songoftheday 2/21/22 - I would give up everything before I'd separate myself from you, after so much suffering I finally found unvarnished truth...

 

 

"Thank God I Found You" - Mariah Carey featuring 98 Degrees & Joe

from the album Rainbow (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 11

 

Today's song is from Mariah Carey, whose seventh studio album Rainbow, her last on the Columbia record label headed by ex-husband Tommy Mottola, had scored a #1 pop hit in the fall of 1999 with "Heartbreaker". For the second single from the set, Mariah joined up with two other acts from two separate genres. Soulful boy-band 98 Degrees were riding high off their second album which scored a trio of top-40 pop hits, while releasing their Christmas disc which scored a minor pop hit with "This Gift" that season. Meanwhile neo-soul singer Joe had landed a top ten pop hit the year before with his collaboration with Case, "Faded Pictures" for the movie Rush Hour. The result was the ballad "Thank God I Found You", written and produced by Carey and the team of Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam Harris (we'll get to that later). The love song was something that could've been released in 1992, albeit with the jittery automated percussion in the background.  I'm not sure why 98 Degrees are there besides to bring their fanbase along, since they're just background singers to a duet between Mariah and Joe, where each note falls clunkily like a paint by numbers song...

Mariah was still riding high at that point, and "Thank God I Found You" became the second #1 pop hit from Rainbow in February of 2000. A redone version replacing 98 Degrees with rapper Nas, done for the urban radio market, helped it also spend a week at #1 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in Canada (#2), Spain (#6), and the UK (#10), and made the top-40 in Switzerland (#17), Italy (#21), The Netherlands (#23), Belgium (#23W/#36F), Australia (#27), France (#28), Germany (#28), Ireland (#31), and New Zealand (#34). At the Grammy Awards in 2001, "Thank God I Found You" was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Collaboration (the only radio hit of the five nominees), but lost to B.B. King and Dr. John's "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby".

Perhaps what kept it from winning was the lawsuit brought on by songwriters Seth Swirsky and Warryn Campbell accusing Carey, Lewis, and Harris of plagiarism. Accusing them of cribbing from their composition "One Of Those Love Songs" which was an album track on R&B group Xscape's Traces Of My Lipstick album in 1998, after the original suit was tossed by the court, the case was reinstated and eventually both sides quietly settled. Here's the Xscape track to compare. Honestly both songs are so generic that they should both be tossed for blandness...

Mariah and the Rainbow album will return to the series.

 

(4/10)

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As I mentioned, a completely separate version of "Thank God I Found You" which featured Joe and rapper Nas, was released for the R&B market. It topped that genre's chart, and was on the single and eventually on Joe's next album My Name Is Joe. It was dubbed the "Make It Last" remix because it interpolated the Keith Sweat nugget "Make It Last Forever"...

At the American Music Awards in 2000, Mariah, Joe. and Nas performed a mashup of the two versions...

and lastly, Mariah and Joe on Spanish TV in 2000...

 Up tomorrow: This powerhouse R&B group makes it hard to accomplish the title.