Songoftheday 9/29/22 - He called her on the road from a lonely cold hotel room, just to hear her say I love you one more time...
"I'm Already There" - Lonestar
from the album I'm Already There (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #24 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11
Today's song comes from the country music group Lonestar, whose third album Lonely Grill had brought them squarely into the mainstream, placing four singles on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 all-genre chart between 1999 and 2000 with "Tell Her", "What About Now", "Smile", and the song that took them all the way to #1 on the pop chart, "Amazed". Later in 2000 they released a holiday album, This Christmas Time, which rose to #95 on Billboard 200 sales tally and #11 on the Country Albums list, and four of its tracks got enough airplay to make the Country chart with "Little Drummer Boy" doing the best with four weeks on the list with a high of #46.
At the beginning of the summer of the following year, Lonestar returned with their next regular studio album, I'm Already There. Since three of the four big hits from their last release were ballads, it made sense to start out of the gate with another one. "I'm Already There", written by Lonestar lead singer Richie McDonald along with industry veterans Gary Baker and Frank J. Myers, starts out as the "musician on the road" song, comforting his children who miss him. When they ask when he'll be back, Richie goes into the weird chorus where he does the "the lesson is the friends you make along the way" schpiel like "I'm the shadow on the ground, I'm the whisper in the wind" like he's dead or something (but he's on the phone with them). Anyhoo McDonald tries to sell the Hallmark sentiment with his quivering voice that passes for emotion, and with Dann Huff's power-ballad production going to recreate "Amazed" a second time, the soccer moms responded favorably, and the band found themselves with another crossover success, albeit not the juggernaut that "Amazed" was...
"I'm Already There" made the top-40 on Billboard's Hot 100 in June of 2001. The song topped their Country Songs chart for six weeks, but after the events of 9/11 the song grew even bigger crossing over to the Adult Contemporary (or "Easy listening") radio list, spending over a year (58 weeks) there with two of them at #2, while making it to #29 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format. Internationally, the single was a minor hit in the UK at #81. The I'm Already There" album, released in June as the single was cresting on country radio, became their first top ten set on the Billboard 200 sales tally, as well as spending a week at #1 on the Country Albums list, going on to sell over a million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "I'm Already There" was nominated for Best Country Duo/Group Performance with Vocals as well as Best Country Song, losing both to Alison Krauss and Union Station's "The Lucky One". Both Lonestar and this album will return to the series.
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Here's the band performing the song on an awards show...
Simon Cowell used "I'm Already There" quite a bit for fodder for contestants on both the American and British versions of his show The X Factor. One of those UK performances caused the cover of the song from Irish boy-band Westlife (of American "Swear It Again" fame) to have a minor hit in Ireland (#47) and the UK (#63) with their album cut from Back Home in 2007...
Back to Lonestar from a radio gig in 2012...
Up tomorrow: Big boy band busts bigtime.
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