Robbed hit of the week 12/09/24 - David Lee Murphy's "Loco"...

 

 

"Loco" - David Lee Murphy

from the album Tryin' To Get Home (2004)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #44 

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from singer/songwriter David Lee Murphy. who grew up in southern Illinois, and moved to Nashville to start a country music career in his early twenties. Initially spending a long time writing for others, Murphy would eventually be signed to MCA Records. In 1994, he landed a song on the soundtrack to the rodeo cowboy movie 8 Seconds, which made the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales tally at #33, selling over a million copies. His song,  the mid-tempo two-step number "Just Once", was promoted as a single, and rose to #36 on Billboard magazine's Country Songs chart. David's debut album, Out With A Bang, arrived in August of that year and included that song, but the follow-up, the slow swing of "Fish Ain't Bitin'", faltered at #52 on the country chart. 

But in those days, labels had much more patience than now, and it paid off when the third try from his debut, "Party Crowd", rose all the way to #6 on the Country Chart. Fortunes got even better when David's next single, "Dust On The Bottle", topped the Country Songs list for two weeks in the late summer of 1995. The title track went to #13 giving Murphy five charting tracks out of the ten on the record, which went to #10 on Billboard's Country Albums chart and #52 on the Billboard 200, spending over a year on the former and going on to sell a half million copies.

The following year, David returned with his sophomore effort Gettin' Out The Good Stuff, which kept the momentum at first by scoring a pair of top ten hits out of its four singles with the soft rock-tinged "Every Time I Get Around You" at #2 and the morality parable "The Road You Leave Behind" at #5. The album went to #104 on the Billboard 200 and #12 on the Country Albums list. However, when he tried to shift his musical direction on his third disc, We Can't All Be Angels, it wasn't as warmly received, with the two singles in the lower half of the country top-40. After this point David left MCA and delved more again into writing for other acts. 

After a seven year break, Koch Records signed Murphy to their Audium label and he released Tryin' To Get There in 2004. The lead single from the record was "Loco", which he co-wrote and co-produced with Kim Tribble, who also co-wrote "Just Once" with him. The songs is in the lazy, crazy beach vibe perfected by Jimmy Buffett and co-opted by Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson. In it, David sings about just letting it go and partying (though it mildly calls for funny shot glasses and string lights). The production is a little cold but it is nice to hear the fiddle prominently. In return, David organically found himself with a comeback...

While "Loco" climbed all the way to #5 on Billboard's Country Songs chart, the song stopped just a few notches short of the top-40 on the Hot 100 in July of 2004. Internationally, the single made it to #9 on the Canadian country chart as well. The Tryin' To Get There album, released in March of that year, stopped at #46 on Billboard's Country Albums sales tally. 

The second single from the record, the ballad "Inspiration", paired him with veteran guitarist and singer Lee Roy Parnell. It stalled at #46 on the Country Songs chart. 

Not long after, Koch Records closed shop, and Murphy went back to focusing on writing. At least four of his songs, "Living In Fast Forward" and "Live A Little" by Kenny Chesney,, "Big Green Tractor" and "The Only Way I Know" by Jason Aldean, "Anywhere With You" by Jake Owen, and "Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not" from Thompson Square, climbed to #1 on the Country Aiplay chart. The Thompson Square track got David nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 2012, losing to Taylor Swift for "Mean". 

Chesney returned the favor in the latter half of the 2010s by helping produce David's most recent album, No Zip Code, on his Blue Chair label through the indie Reiver Records in 2017. Kenny also was featured on the first single, "Everything's Gonna Be Alright", which returned Murphy to #1 on the Country Airplay chart twenty two years after "Dust On The Bottle" did the trick. 

(5/10)

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Here's David performing the song live in concert in 2019...