Songoftheday 2/7/22 - I can feel the magic floating in the air being with you gets me that way, I watch the sunlight dance across your face and I've never been this swept away...

 

 

"Breathe" - Faith Hill

from the album Breathe (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (five weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 42

 

Today's song comes from Faith Hill, who veered from country music into the mainstream pop world in a big way in 1998 with her third album Faith, which spawned the top ten pop hit "This Kiss" as well as the top-40 follow-up "Let Me Let Go".  Hill returned the following year with Breathe, another adult-pop collection. The lead single for the set was the title track, written by Stephanie Bentley and Holly Lamar, and produced by Hill with Byron Gallimore. The song was a big power-ballad that is adrift in romantic platitudes, but Hill carries them off in an assertive yet seductive way, as opposed to the younger crowd of dumbing down divas. Faith's clout in Nashville was still high, so she succeeded both on country radio as well as mainstream stations, and in the end had Billboard magazine's top Hot 100 hit of 2000, only the second time (after Sam the Sham & The Pharoah's "Wooly Bully") a song that didn't go to #1 did so...

"Breathe" rose to the runner-up spot on the Hot 100 chart in American in April of 2000, spending over a year (53 weeks) on the list. The song topped Billboard's Country Singles for six weeks as well. But her biggest success with the track was on "easy listening" radio, where it spent 17 weeks at #1 on the Adult Contemporary radio chart, as well as a week on top of the Adult Top-40 format list. Internationally, the single was a top-40 hit in Belgium (#6F/#15W), Finland (#18), Australia (#23), New Zealand (#27), and the UK (#33). The Breathe album, released in November of 1999, spent a week at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and six weeks at the top of the Country Albums list, going on to sell over eight million copies in the U.S.. At the Grammy Awards in 2001, "Breathe" won for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, while the album took home the Best Country Album prize. Faith and the Breathe album will be back to the series.

(6/10)

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Here's Faith performing "Breathe" on The View promoting the album...

Next up, singing the song with the man who kept her from being #1, Carlos Santana, for her TV special...

Hill performing "Breathe" on the 2001 Grammys, where she took home three awards...

And lastly, at the Live 8 concert in 2005...

Up tomorrow: This indie-rock band is sitting tight.