Songoftheday 11/7/22 - I never felt this way, how do you give me so much pleasure and cause me so much pain?

 

 

"Fallin'" - Alicia Keys

from the album Songs From A Minor (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (six weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 29

 

Today's song comes from Alicia Keys, who grew up as Alicia Augello Cook in Manhattan with her single mother, who exposed her to music at a very young age. While attending arts school in the city, Alicia was signed to Columbia Records, who had subsequently attempted to mold her into a corporate pop starlet with other people brought in to co-write with her. After only a couple songs recorded for the label, including "Dah Dee Dah (Sexy Thing)" for the soundtrack to the first Men In Black film, which topped the Billboard 200 sales chart in 1997, she successfully negotiated to have herself released from the company. 

In 1998, Alicia was signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records, but again after a couple of soundtrack contributions, her debut album was stalled when Davis left the label. After Clive created his new J Records, he recruited Keys, and she was finally able to finish her debut album Songs In A Minor, which was released in the summer of 2001. The lead single of the record, "Fallin'", was written and produced by Alicia herself. The song starts out with a piano run that would become iconic to the track, leading into Alicia singing about the push and pull of a relationship and trying to hang on. The lyrics are quite simple - the anchor is the music, with the piano along with the slow ebb and flow of the rhythm section that is understated in the piece. It's a daring move in the world of overproduced dance-pop at the time, but it worked incredibly well. Helping this out was a choice placement on the then-highest-rated talk show of the time, Oprah, who had championed Keys and gave her a prime slot right before the release of the album. The music video has Alicia visiting her incarcerated boyfriend in prison...

"Fallin'" became Alicia's first and biggest hit pop single, spending over a month at #1 starting in August of 2001, while taking four weeks at the top of Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart. On the radio, the song topped the Mainstream Top-40 chart for five weeks, as well as the R&B Airplay list for seven weeks. It also spent five weeks atop the older-skewing Adult R&B radio chart, while peaking at #14 on the Adult Top-40 list and #26 at the Adult Contemporary (or easy listening) format, and even rose to #2 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic radio chart. Internationally, the single went to #1 in New Zealand, the Netherlands and Belgium (F), while reaching the top ten in Germany (#2), Switzerland (#2), Norway (#2), the United Kingdom (#3), Ireland (#3), Austria (#3), Poland (#4), France (#5), Croatia (#5), Italy (#6), Spain (#6), Sweden (#7), Australia (#7), and Greece (#10). The Songs In A Minor album, released in June of that year, spent three weeks at #1, going on to sell over seven million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, Alicia was nominated in six categories, and won five of them - Song Of The Year, Best R&B Song, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Album, and Best New Artist. The odd one out - Record Of The Year - went to U2 for "Walk On". Both Alicia and this album will be back to the series.

(10/10)

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Here's the star-making performance on Oprah that simply was the best piece of marketing that Keys could've received...

She had a whole band backup on her appearance on Jools Holland's Later program in the UK the same year...

Alicia also performed "Fallin'" at the MTV Video Music Awards...

Fast forward to 2012 and in concert at the iTunes Festival in London...

and lastly, at the BBC Live Lounge in the UK in 2020...

Up tomorrow: A soul icon is on a date.