Songoftheday 6/9/23 - I never knew there were such great movies on TV at three a.m., I'd have never guessed that at midnight Tuesday I could have pizza ordered in...

 

 

"I Should Be Sleeping" - Emerson Drive

from the album Emerson Drive (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #35 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 3

 

Today's song comes from the Canadian country band Emerson Drive, who originally started out under the name 12 Gauge in the city of Grande Prairie in Alberta Province (coincidentally it's the northernmost city of over 50000 people in the country). At first high schoolmates, they released their first album Open Season independently in 1996, followed by Until You Walk The Tracks a year later. Their second record scored a top-40 country hit in Canada with "Some Trains Never Come" (#36).  After that, four members of the group - lead singer Brad Mates, fiddle player Pat Allingham, bassist Jeff Loberg, and keyboard player Chris Hartman, along with new members Mike Melancon on drums and Danick Dupelle on guitars and vocals (both also from Canada), moved to Nashville to try to break into the American market. As there was already a rapper from Georgia with the name 12 Gauge, who had a top-40 pop hit in the U.S. in 1994 with "Dunkie Butt", they rechristened themselves "Emerson Drive", a nod to a road in their homeland. Eventually signed to DreamWorks Records, the band released their eponymous major-label debut album in the spring of 2002. The lead single from the record was the mid-tempo track "I Should Be Sleeping". Written by Lisa Drew and Shaye Smith, the lyrics are about someone who has insomnia, but for good reason - their in a new love and can't stop thinking about them. It's a bouncy, optimistic production from James Stroud and Julian King, and the sunny delivery of the vocals keeps it from being creepy, even when he admits it's been only three dates in. The music video definitely helped, with Mates transformed into what should be a boy-band member, and he lifted the rest to get a lot of exposure on Country Music Television, enough so to sell enough CD singles and get enough radio airplay to make the top-40 on the "big" chart, Billboard magazine's Hot 100

"I Should Be Sleeping" hit the top-40 on the Hot 100 in June of 2002, while climbing to #4 on Billboard's Country Songs radio chart. The Emerson Drive album, released in May of that year, went to #108 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #13 on the Country Albums list. 

Both Emerson Drive and the Emerson Drive album will be back to the series.

(6/10)

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Here's the band performing the song in 2012 in concert...

Song of the day (and the blog) will be off for a week following tomorrow's rundown of my top tunes for the previous week. Thanks for reading and please come back!