Songoftheday 5/15/22 - I try but I can't seem to get myself to think of anything but you, your breath on my face your warm gentle kiss I taste...

 

 

"I Wanna Be With You" - Mandy Moore

from the albums I Wanna Be With You and Center Stage (Original Soundtrack) (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #24 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 4

 

Today's song comes from singer and actress Mandy Moore, who grew up in Florida, and had sung on some children's records before being discovered by producer/songwriters Tony Battaglia and Shaun Fisher, who helped her get signed to Epic Records as a teen. In 1999, Moore released her debut album So Real. The lead single, "Candy", was produced by Battaglia and Fisher along with Denny Kleiman, who wrote the song with Dave Katz and "song doctor" Denise Rich. Mandy got a push from opening for NSYNC on tour, but the song unfairly stopped just short of the top-40 on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart at #41, though the album did make the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales tally selling almost a million copies.

 

Switching promotion from the 550 Music label to mother label Epic Records proper, they rush-released a second "album" that contained five of the eleven songs on So Real along with some newly-recorded material. One of those new songs was the title track for the new set, "I Wanna Be With You". Written by Tiffany Arbuckle, who records in her own right as Plumb, Shelly Peiken, who wrote two #1 hits for Christina Aguilera, and producer Keith Thomas, its a breathy young love ballad that hints at sensualism much like Jessica Simpson's "I Wanna Love You Forever". The song was used in the "teen ballet" movie Center Stage, and the music video is set on a dance rehearsal floor, interspersed with scenes from the movie with hunky Sascha Radetsky twirling up a storm...

 

 With the movie exposure and added radio promotion, Moore finally claimed her first and only top-40 hit on the Hot 100 in August of 2000. The song just missed the top ten on the Mainstream Top-40 radio format chart at #11, while getting to #31 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic airplay list helped by a remix by the Soul Solution team. Internationally, the single reached the top-40 in Australia (#13), the UK (#21), Canada (#24), and Ireland (#34). The I Wanna Be With You album, released in May of that year, made it to #21 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, selling over a half million copies, while the soundtrack to Center Stage, released the same month, placed at #120 on the list. 

A second single from the set was actually the title track from her first album, "So Real", which was a top-40 hit in New Zealand (#18) and Australia (#21), but was ignored in the States, whose pop radio stations at the time were playing "Walk Me Home" from the set, which missed the Hot 100 but placed on the Pop Radio chart at #38. 

In 2001, Moore returned with her next album on Epic, Mandy Moore. Attempting to rebrand herself from the tart-pop that she came in on with Britney and Xtina, the album featured a couple of cuts co-written and produced by Gloria's husband Emilio Estefan, including the lead single "In My Pocket". With South Asian instrumentation touches, the song climbed to #21 on Billboard's Mainstream Top-40 radio chart, but only managed to "bubble under" the Hot 100 at #102. Down Under, she got more love with a top-40 hit in Australia (#11) and New Zealand (#26). The self-titled album scored a third top-40 hit on the Billboard 200, just missing selling a half million but shipping gold away. 

The next couple of years saw Mandy have growing success as an actor, with roles in a couple a big films like Dr. Doolittle and The Princess Diaries before landing a starring role in the Christian romance film A Walk To Remember, which did quite well, making 47 million on a 11 million budget. The soundtrack, which featured four songs from Moore, hit #34 on the Billboard 200 and sold over a million copies.

Mandy came back in 2003 with what would be her final album on Epic, Coverage, a collection of remakes that got a lot of praise from fans if few critics. It became her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200 at #14, but again the lead single "Have A Little Faith In Me", a cover of rocker John Hiatt, missed the Hot 100, although it popped on to the Mainstream Top-40 radio list at #39. 

Leaving Epic, Moore again went back to acting in a bunch of projects before signing on with EMI Records' The Firm label, where she released Wild Hope in 2007. A more organic affair with just one producer, John Alagia, who has worked with Paul Simon and the Dave Matthews Band, the set got a good reception both critically and commercially, continuing her streak of top-40 studio albums at #30. The main single from the record, "Extraordinary", again "bubbled under" the Hot 100 at #102, but was a decent hit on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format at #25. Two years later, Moore released her next album Amanda Leigh independently on the Storefront imprint through Sony's RED distribution, and got her sixth top-40 album at #25.

Moore voiced the main role of Rapunzel in the massively successful Disney animated film Tangled, and while she sang a couple songs in the movie, they didn't have the usual Disney push (the juggernaut was way past its heyday by then), although they remain her most popular tracks on Spotify, with "I See The Light" with co-star Zachary Levi on top. That song won the Grammy Award for Best Original Song from Visual Media, and was nominated for an Oscar, losing to Randy Newman's "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3. 

She pretty much dropped out of the music scene after that, though continued on with acting. Music projects were announced but not carried through, most like affected by her tumultuous marriage to rock musician Ryan Adams. She finally reappeared in 2020 with the album Silver Landings, which unfortunately came out just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of that year, preempting any promotion of the album, which popped on to the Billboard 200 chart for a week at #134. One of its tracks, "When I Wasn't Watching", was co-written by Moore with new husband Taylor Dawes Goldsmith of the indie rock band Dawes, and slipped on to the Alternative Digital Songs chart in Billboard at #24. But what she's best known for now is her starring role in the TV drama This Is Us, playing family matriarch Rebecca Pearson. This year, she put out a new single, "In Real Life", the title track from her just-released this past Friday on the Verve Forecast label.

(4/10)

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Here's Mandy performing "I Wanna Be With You" in concert in 2000...

Next up, a much more beautiful acoustic version in 2006 at a live performance...

and lastly a "COVID quarantine" clip at home with husband Taylor...

Up tomorrow: Everything's great with this Portland alternative rock band.