When the night has come and the land is dark

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

1961 : Stand By Me - Ben E. King


I know this (was it a jeans advert back in the day?) and I think it's my favourite track from the list so far - it's pure clarse!

Yup, it's 2:57 of top notch soul - just effortlessly cool.  And boy does Wikipedia have a LOT on it - 273 milliPeppers on just one song.  So you're only going to get a few highlights, I'm afraid.  I didn't know it was written by Lieber and Stoller (as well as Mr King).  Yes, it was a jeans ad - a 1987 Levis special (which pretty much guaranteed you a hit back then - #1 in this case).  It also featured quite heavily in a 1986 film - can you guess what the film was called?   And, most recently, it was sung at Meghan and Harry's wedding by The Kingdom Choir (and a very fine version it was too).  Interestingly, it's believed (in 2012, anyway) to be the sixth highest earning song ever - quite possibly because of the large number of cover versions.

And when I say large number, I mean LARGE.  Over 400 - FOUR HUNDRED!  You'll be pleased to hear I'm not going to list them all, but there are some "interesting" names on the list - Otis Redding, John Lennon (a very highly regarded version), Cassius Clay(!), Tracy Chapman, Florence And The Machine, Kenny Lynch, Meat Loaf (a tremolo reggae version, apparently), Stephen King (yes, the author), Miley Cyrus, Marc Bolan, Cannon & Ball and, errr, Torvill & Dean (what?).  It's been released as a single a surprising number of times as well - charting seven times in the UK and at least eleven times in the US.

All in all, I'm happy to give the year to Ben but we should check out the competition anyway.  The best selling single of the year in the UK was (who else?) Elvis with "Wooden Heart" - other tracks that jumped out for me were him again with "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" and Del Shannon's "Runaway" - not as many as last year.  The US charts present us with Roy Orbison's "Crying" and The Shirelles' "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" - two fine songs, but again it seems like it wasn't the strongest year.

But it doesn't matter, because Ben would have won most years - it's a thoroughly fine song indeed and it was nice not to have to research why it might possibly have won!

1960 - Another surprising track
1962 - Another one I don't know

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more