Songoftheday 9/5/22 - You don't know how you met me you don't know why, you can't turn around and say goodbye...

 

 

"Follow Me" - Uncle Kracker

from the album Double Wide (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #5 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 27

 

Today's song comes from Uncle Kracker, who was born Matthew Shafer in the outer suburbs of Detroit. There he met Robert James Ritchie, aka "Kid Rock", who hired Shafer on as the turntablist in his band. Dubbing him "Uncle Kracker", Ritchie had Shafer on his first two indie albums. When his career broke with Devil Without A Cause and the top-40 hit "Only God Knows Why" in the spring of 2000, Shafer was poised to release his own solo record which came out the early summer of that year. The lead single from Double Wide was the frat-bro folk-lite of "Follow Me". Written by Shafer with band bassist Michael Bradford, the song's lyrics on the surface read like a guy who's bedding down a cheating woman saying how he'll take care of her "needs". It's smarmy, ir's flaccid, and it's delivered with the vocal emotion of a stoner in a car careening off the road. But the production from Kid Rock and Bradford sounded like a throwback to Motown channeled through the most autotuned Caucasian of mouthpieces, so of course mainstream radio ate it up like pancakes. Soon Shafer would have a hit that even eclipsed Kid Rock's successes at the time. Helped with this is equally smarmy Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray appearing in the music video...

"Follow Me" climbed to the top five of Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in June of 2001. On the radio, the song went to #3 on Mainstream Top-40 radio, but tellingly topped the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format for four weeks, while making it to #7 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") airplay list. Internationally, the single went to #1 in Australia, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, and New Zealand, as well as hitting the top ten in the United Kingdom (#3), Switzerland (#3), and Norway (#6). The Double Wide album, which was released the year prior in June of 2000, stopped at #7 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, spending almost a year on the list and selling over two million copies.

 

Uncle Kracker's follow-up single, "Yeah Yeah Yeah", written by Shafer and Kid Rick with band keyboardist James Trombly, tried to tie in to Kid Rock's fake cowboy schtick with him rapping on the record, which the stations that loved "Follow Me" didn't want anything to do with, even with it being hawked with the Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson movie Shanghai Noon. It failed to make the Hot 100, only making the charts in Australia at #23. 

(4/10)

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Here's UC performing the song acoustically on a German radio station...

and lastly, in a concert on the fair circuit in 2017...

Up tomorrow: This mononymed R&B singer feels lonely.