Songoftheday 5/10/22 -I'm sorry didn't meant to call you but I couldn't fight it, I guess I was weak, I couldn't even hide it...

 

 

"Purest Of Pain (A Puro Dolor)" - Son By Four

from the album Purest Of Pain (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 12

 

Today's song comes from the vocal group Son By Four, who came together in Puerto Rico in the late 1990s. In 1998, they released two salsa-styled singles, "No Hay Razon" ("There Is No Reason") and "Nada" ("Anything") which both reached #21 on Billboard magazine's Hot Latin Songs chart, and appeared on their debut album on the Sony label, Prepárense ("Get Ready"). In 2000 they group returned with their self-titled sophomore effort. The lead single from the set was another salsa number, "A Puro Dolor" ("Purest of Pain"), which became a huge hit on Spanish-language radio, where it was mixed in different styles for Latin Pop, Salsa, Mexican, and Tropical formats. The song, written by producer Omar Alfanno, the song has them pining for a love to return, and how bad it feels for them. The lyrics already had a boy-band quality to them, and when it was rerecorded to a ballad form from the original salsa version, that translated well to this format where it was a novelty, and in return the group scored a huge success, topping the Latin Songs chart in Billboard for twenty weeks, at the time a record...

 

 With this success, Alfanno decided to go full boyband and re-record the ballad in "Spanglish" (part Spanish part English) for the mainstream market, and the synergy between the Latin Explosion of 1999 and the boyband frenzy of the turn of the millennium made the timing of this song perfect, even if the Spanish version is quite a bit stronger...

 

 The Spanglish version of "Purest Of Pain" reached the top-40 on Billboard's Hot 100 in August of 2000, four months after it started its #1 reign on the Latin Songs list. The Son by Four album, released in February of that year, rose to #98 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, selling over a half million copies. It was also re-issued in all English as Purest Of Pain. 

A second single from the record, "Miss Me So Bad (Cuando Seas Mia)", topped the Latin Songs chart for a week, and "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 at #123. A shame, since it was a stronger song than the sappy ballad treatment of "Purest Of Pain". 

Son by Four released their next album, Renace, independently in 2004. The opening song on the set, "Pequenas Cosas" ("Little Things") returned them to the Tropical Airplay chart for a top ten hit at #9. Since then, they've released four more records on their own label, the most recent being Mujer Frente a la Cruz in 2015.

Spanish Version: 7/10   English Version: 5/10

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

The original version of the track was an upbeat salsa tune...

At the Latin Grammys in 2000, Son By Four performed "A Puro Dolor" with NSYNC, who did their own "Yo Te Voy A Amar", the Spanish version of their hit "This I Promise You"...

Up tomorrow: Mississippi rockers feel like Superman.