Songoftheday 6/30/23 - Now nothing can take you away from me, we've been down that road before...

 

 

"Heaven" - DJ Sammy & Yanou featuring Do

from the album Heaven (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #8 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 21

 

Today's song comes from Spanish DJ/producer DJ Sammy, who grew up as Samuel Bouriah on the Mediterranean vacation island of Mallorca. Honing his craft spinning records at the nightclubs on the island, where he met his Dutch then-wife Marie-José van der Kolk, who joined Sammy as a vocalist under the alias Carisma. He was signed as an artist with the Urban label (distributed by Universal Records) in the mid-1990s. Sammy (with Carisma), released her debut album Life Is Just A Game in 1998. He had some success in Germany, placing four singles on their chart, with "Prince Of Love" making the top-40 at #24. Later that year, he released a multi-artist remix album DJ Sammy At Work, and scored a second German Top-40 hit with "In 2 Eternity". 

For Sammy's second release in 2001, he switched to another Eurodance label in Germany, Motor, for Heaven, named for the anchor track on the disc, a trance music remake of the Bryan Adams rock ballad from 1985. Instead of Carisma (who sings on four tracks on the disc), this record featured another Dutch dance music singer Dominique Rijpma van Hulst, who recorded under the name Do. Do, who had released a single in 2000, "Real Good", to little notice, was also joined on the cover by German DJ Yanou. The result was a trance track with bumped up the tempo to harken back to Eurodance's glory days of a decade prior. Do's vocals are soothing if a little unemotional, but it's moot as the single is meant to send you to the dance floor. The music video has a little bit of Euro Japanese appropriation...

 

 With radio playing both the original and the "ballad" version of the song, which eliminated the production behind her, DJ Sammy, Yanou, and Do's "Heaven" reached the top-40 in charts all over the world in 2001, and a year later, finally reached American shores, where it went all the way to the top ten on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in August of 2002. On the radio, the song went to #4 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, #23 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic format, and the "ballad version" was able to get to #21 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list. The remixes of the track put it on the Dance Club Play chart but with a rather modest showing for such a big pop hit at #30. Internationally, the single topped the chart in the United Kingdom for a week, reached the top ten in Ireland (#3), Australia (#4), France (#5), Canada (#7), Norway (#8), and Germany (#10). It also made the top-40 in the Netherlands (#12), Belgium (#14 Flanders/#36 Wallonia), Spain (#16), Austria (#16), Sweden (#17), Romania (#28), and Switzerland (#39). The Heaven album, released in August as the single was cresting, rose to #67 on the Billboard 200 sales tally in America. 

 

DJ Sammy's next single from Heaven was another 80's remake, this time Don Henley's "The Boys Of Summer", which featured van der Kolk, who now was going by the alias Loona. The song was a modest success, hitting the ten in the UK (#2), New Zealand (#3), and Australia (#9), but aside from the maxi-single reaching the sales chart, it went relatively unnoticed in America. That was followed by an original, "Sunlight", which landed a third top ten hit in Britain at #8 proving they can work without a remake. 

Sammy returned with his third and so far most recent studio album The Rise in 2005. Again he went the lite-club remake route with a take on Annie Lennox's "Why" featuring German singer Britta Medeiros, which rewarded him with a fourth and final top ten British hit at #7. 

Since then Sammy has been mostly behind the scenes, producing tracks for other artists and building a DJ reputation in the Balearic club scene. In 2013, Sammy came back to the German chart at #65 with "Shut Up And Kiss Me" with The Jackie Boyz. He's released singles with others from time to time, most recently with Loona along with Jerome on "Bailando" which arrived this June. 

Yanou went on to work with a bunch of acts, most notably German neo-Eurodance superstars Cascada. He has a single with Beam (as Avalon 1), "Light Of Mystery", in 2021.

Do released her self-titled debut solo album in her home country in 2004, from which came the Dutch top ten hits "Love Is Killing Me" (#6) and "Angel By My Side" (#10).  In 2011 she topped the singles chart in Holland with "Hij Gelooft In Mij" ("He Believes In Me"). Her most recent single, "Hetzelfde" ("The Same"), came out in April of 2023.

(5/10)

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Here's the downtempo "Candlelight Mix" which helped pop radio grab on to the single in America...

and lastly, the trio on a live TV appearance in Europe in 2002...

Song of the day will return Monday with a record label supergroup who are ready for action.