Songoftheday 3/8/23 - Cutting through the darkest night are my two headlights Trying to keep it clear but I'm losing it here to the twilight...
"Standing Still" - Jewel
from the album This Way (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #25 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11
Today's song comes from singer/songwriter Jewel, who slight swerve from her indie-folk beginnings to adult pop on "Hands" in the beginning of 1999 brought her back into the top ten on the pop chart. Later that year, she released a Christmas album, Joy: A Holiday Collection. The set placed at #32 on the Billboard 200 sales tally and went on to sell over a million copies.
A year later, Jewel re-emerged with her fourth disc, This Way. The lead single, "Standing Still", was written by the singer with Rick Nowels, and produced by her with Dann Huff, who mostly works in the country music realm. The song starts off like a return to her roots, with acoustic guitars behind Jewel's singing about how life on the road has stunted her personal life. However the fast-paced drum machine comes in to knock it back into pop-land, where Jewel seems to be running to catch up with the pace. It's a pleasant track, nothing mind-grabbing though intensely personal to her own journey, and her fans and radio responded favorably, putting Jewel back on the charts. The music video is kind of cheesy, like specifically hiring "types" to fit different demographics as she coasts the town before her show....
"Standing Still" became Jewel's fifth top-40 hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in February of 2002. On the radio, the song peaked at #22 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, and spent six weeks at #3 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, while rising to #19 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio panel. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in New Zealand (#7) and Australia (#32), and was a minor hit in the United Kingdom at #83. The This Way album, released in November of 2001, crested at #9 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies.
The second single from the album was "Break Me", a light power-ballad that sported a video that had the weirdest confrontation between protestor and police until Kendall Jenner's Pepsi commercial. The song didn't make the Hot 100, but got to #28 on the Adult Top-40 chart. That was followed by title track "This Way", which was "punched up" from its original acoustic production for the radio, though it again just made the Adult Top-40 airplay list at #36. Lastly, another track from This Way, "Serve The Ego", was her first to be given the official "remix" treatment for the clubs, and heavily promoted there. It served her well, granting her a #1 hit on the Dance Club Play chart in Billboard in the autumn of 2002.
Jewel will be back to the series.
(6/10)
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and again at the VH1 Awards in 2002..
Up tomorrow: Country newcomer wakes up in love.
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