Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson was released in 1972, a follow-up to the prior year’s Nilsson Schmilsson, his biggest commercial hit. This album was more experimental and risky than its predecessor.
A case in point is today’s jaunty SOTD, ‘You’re Breakin’ My Heart,’ which could have been a hit had it not opened with the lines “You’re breaking my heart, you’re tearing it apart, so fuck you.” Nearly 40 years later, in a much different era, Cee-Lo Green found success with a similar sentiment.
‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is a track from Elvis Costello’s 1993 album The Juliet Letters, a song cycle for voice and strings recorded with The Brodsky Quartet.
I try to imagine crowds watching Costello in his young punk days belting out ‘Pump It Up’ and then immediately fast-forwarding to this, or his classic country album, or his collaboration with Burt Bacharach. The man has certainly carved out a unique career path.
Guess who has the #6 song on Billboard’s Hot 100 this week? If you said Drake, you win a prize! ‘God’s Plan’ is his third track in the top six. I featured it a couple of months back.
At #7 is Juice WRLD with ‘Lucid Dreams,’ a heartbreak song driven by a sample of Sting’s ‘Shape of My Heart.’ Or, as Juice WLRD put it, “my producer Nick Mira used a sample from the band Sting, and I was like ‘Wow, I gotta really take off on this.'”
Drake makes his second appearance in the top five with ‘Nice For What,’ a song I’ve already featured (the last time I looked at the charts). That song, like Maroon 5’s ‘Girls Like You,’ features a video full of cameos by female celebrities.
At #5 is a female on her way to becoming famous enough to appear in one of those videos. Ella Mai, an English singer-songwriter, is the first woman since Beyoncé (in 2012) to top the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop, R&B/Hip-Hop and Adult R&B charts.
Cardi B shows up again in Billboard’s #2 spot, in support of Maroon 5 on the song ‘Girl Like You.’ Maroon 5 is such a consistent hit machine at this point it’s almost silly. No other band churns out hooky pop tunes like this one. They have had 29 songs on the Hot 100, 14 in the Top Ten and three at #1.
‘Girls Like You’ is a good song but an even better video. Edited to look like one unbroken take, the video puts Adam Levine in the middle of a room as a succession of notable women appear and disappear behind him. Gal Gadot, Camila Cabello, Ellen DeGeneres, Tiffany Haddish, Aly Raisman and on and on. Here’s a list of all 26 women in the order they appear.
