The week of June 9, 1984, saw Cyndi Lauper atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Time After Time,’ a song I have already featured on the blog.
Falling to #2 after owning the top spot the week before was Deniece Williams’ ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy’ from the Footloose soundtrack. This was the fourth single from that soundtrack and the second to reach #1, following Kenny Loggins’ title track.
Throwing back to the week of June 8, 1974, we find Paul McCartney atop the Billboard Hot 100 just as he was a decade earlier. Of course, this time it’s with Wings rather than The Beatles.
‘Band on the Run’ is the title track from Wings’ third studio album, and it’s certainly one of the best songs the band ever released. It finds McCartney imagining a band breaking out of jail, an image he says was inspired by increasing police crackdowns on musicians’ marijuana possession.
Today’s 1995 album isn’t exactly new to me — it found a home in my CD collection when I married my wife 27 years ago. But I haven’t spent enough time with it over the years to consider it a favorite.
Annie Lennox’s Medusa was her second solo album after taking a break from Eurythmics in 1990. Her first release, Diva, was a very successful collection of original pop soul songs. This one had a similar sound but focused entirely on covers of other artists’ material.
Smashing Pumpkins’ third studio album was a sprawling, two-disc opus that became an unlikely hit in 1975. Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness combines the band’s typical heavy metal and grunge sound with softer, more experimental songs, resulting in a 28-track marathon.
There’s a theory that every double album would be better if culled down to its best 12 songs (see my recent editing of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department). That is definitely the case with this one.
As Throwback Weekends have made clear, Mariah Carey was dominant in the mid-90s. The singer’s fifth studio album, 1995’s Daydream, became the most biggest her career and one of the top-selling albums of all time.
Buoyed by three #1 hits, the album reached Diamond status. Those three chart-toppers (‘Fantasy,’ ‘One Sweet Day,’ and ‘Always Be My Baby’) spent a collective six months atop the Hot 200.
This sort of pop-inflect R&B is definitely not my thing, so I didn’t find a ton to like in this album. But I will admit an affection for two of those hit singles.
Meet Me In Montauk 