Songoftheday 7/24/22 -Posters of love surrounding me lost in a world of fantasy, every night she comes to me and gives me all the love I need...

 

 

"Liquid Dreams" - O-Town

from the album O-Town (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 10

 

Today's song comes from O-Town, a boy-band assembled as part of a "reality singing competition" show headed up by felon and recently deceased scuzzball Lou Pearlman, who had earlier put together the groups Backstreet Boys and NSYNC (before taking all their money and getting sued to release them). Hoping to bring the "process" to a television format, Pearlman and the ABC Network produced Making The Band, which would cull a herd of 25 young men to five spots (of course) for this new act, which would be signed to Clive Davis' label J Records. The final five (after one defection) would be Ashley Parker Angel, Erik-Michael Estrada, Trevor Penick, Jacob Underwood, and Dan Miller. Their debut single in the fall of 2000 was "Liquid Dreams". Written by Michael Norfleet, Quincy Patrick, Bradley Spalter, and Joshua Thompson, with the latter two producing, the song seems to take LFO's schtick and dumbs it down even more, checking off names of all the "hot" women in the current eye paired with lyrics that not only make up ridiculous words like "morphorotic" as a compliment but contains "She's a dominatrix supermodel beauty queen". All to get to the punchline of the chorus that tells his girl "You've got the star of my liquid dreams". Oh. So she's giving you WET DREAMS. Really. And this was passed off as Disney-friendly radio fare for 2000. I just can't....

 

 

Nevertheless, with the flood of marketing from ABC and promotion from MTV and the boy-band fad at full crest, "Liquid Dreams" made it into the Hot 100 top 10 in January of 2001. On the radio, the song climbed to #25 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart in Billboard magazine, so it wasn't just a sales phenomenon. Internationally the single topped the sales chart in Canada, and made the top ten in the UK at #3, while reaching the top-40 in Belgium (#11F) and Ireland (#13). The group's self-titled debut album, released in January as the single was peaking, went to #5 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, spending over a year on the list and selling over a million copies. Both O-Town and the debut album will be back to the series (oh, joy). 

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Here's the group live in concert in 2001...

Up tomorrow: Pop Icon goes to the dude ranch to avoid the news.