Songoftheday 9/10/22 - Damn this old wheels rolling too slow, I stare down this white line with so far to go...

 

 

"If My Heart Had Wings" - Faith Hill

from the album Breathe (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #39 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 1

 

Today's song is from country music singer Faith Hill, whose pop music-slanted fourth album Breathe had spun off the biggest Hot 100 hit of 2000 according to Billboard magazine with "Breathe", along with the long-running follow-up "The Way You Love Me", which eventually made the pop top ten in January of 2001. However, the dominance of those two tracks on the radio dampened the reaction to her third track, "Let's Make Love", another power-duet with husband Tim McGraw that I'm sure was designed to be the "hat trick" of the record. Although it won them a Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals in 2001, the song stalled down at #54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #6 on the Country Airplay chart (even though it stayed on there for a hefty 45 weeks). Personally, I wasn't too upset over that, since the song was a blatant and crass attempt at just delving into the same mine they've already dug up with "It's Your Love" and "Just To Hear You Say That You Love Me". She also had a song on the Jim Carrey reboot of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, "Where Are You Christmas", which which stopped at #26 on the Country Singles chart and #65 on the Hot 100, though it was a bigger success on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") format, which is heavy on holiday songs in the season, where it rose to #10. 

Thankfully Faith rebounded with the best of the singles from the record,"If My Heart Had Wings". Written by Fred Knoblock and Annie Roboff, the propulsive uptempo track is like a breath of country-fresh air to the pop she was delivering ably but a little stagnantly. The song has Faith traveling to her love (presumably Tim), with a lot of quick, alliterative lines of what she's encountering as she goes, before venturing into the agreement that a lot of (read: professional musician) couples make to further their career by needing to spent so much time apart. Hill sings all this with utter conviction, and the triumphant tone that no matter what they'll weather the storms had proven true by their still-strong marriage even today. Like many late-single releases from country artists, the music video comes from dubbed-in concert footage...

"If My Heart Had Wings" returned Faith to the Hot 100 top-40 in April of 2001. The song also spent a week at #3 on Billboard's Country Airplay chart. 

Like a bunch of high-profile releases in country music, that genre's radio had a habit of doing "album bombs", and Breathe was one of them, with a handful of non-single tracks garnering airplay on the albums release in November of 1999, along with one, "There Will Come A Day", which did get some significant radio love, rising to #36 in the fall of 2001 after her performance of the song on a televised  9/11 charity show. The Bryan Adams-sounding "I Got My Baby" also spent a month on the country airplay chart, with a high of 63, while two more songs popped on for a week with "It Will Be Me" at #68 and "If I'm Not In Love" at #74. But don't fret, Faith will be back to the series very soon. 

(9/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's the original studio version of the song...

 and lastly, a live televised performance...

Up tomorrow: This country duo can't find a flaw.