Robbed hit of the week 09/30/24 - Sara Evans' "Perfect"...

 

 

"Perfect" - Sara Evans

from the album Restless (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #46 (two weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from country music singer Sara Evans, whose third album on RCA Records Born To Fly had scored three big hits that crossed over to the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "Born To Fly", "I Could Not Ask For More", and "I Keep Looking".  Sara released her fourth disc Restless in the summer of 2003 with the poignant ballad "Backseat Of A Greyhound Bus" as the lead single. Like Tim McGraw's "Red Rag Top", the song took on a dark but very real subject of an unmarried but very pregnant woman leaving home and ending up having a baby on the road (a subject that's boomeranged back in the post Roe-v-Wade aftermath). While the single spent a half of a year (26 weeks) on Billboard's Country Songs airplay chart, it only made it as high as #16 as some stations were hesitant to play it to a great extent, and it ended up only "bubbling under" the Hot 100 at #103. It deserved much better.

For the follow-up, the much more mainstream-friendly "Perfect" was offered up. Written by the singer with industry pros Tony Martin and Tom Shapiro, the song is a bubbly romance ode to the day-to-day faults in a relationship. From not getting jetted to Europe to family disapproval, Sara seems happy as a clam in the affair (telling since the upcoming troubles she would have). The production from Paul Worley plays like a mid-tempo Sheryl Crow track, with the light electric guitars dominating. 

While "Perfect" brought Sara back to the runner-up spot on Billboard's Country Airplay chart for a week, the song stopped a handful of spots under the Hot 100 in April of 2004. She'll do even better with her next single.

(8/10)

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Here's Sara performing the song in concert in 2007...