Tell me one thing more before I go
Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.
23/12/90 : Soul Provider - Michael Bolton
I knew there was no escape from the man! I'm actually expecting this to be pretty anodyne but not hateable - the man seemed to get a lot of stick for putting stuff out that a lot of people liked. It's one "we" owned so we maintain 100% ownership but I'm not sure I listened to it all that often, so I'm coming to it very fresh.
Yeah, it's not for me but it's perfectly listenable. He has a nice voice, but he does overdo the dramatics rather too frequently for my liking. And yes, it's cheesy but it's well done cheese - "How Am I Supposed To Live Without You" just has to be admired really and I have to admit I found my toes unexpectedly tapping along at various other times. Yes, it's all forgettable and it's not really my thing, but it wasn't nearly as dreadful as others would have you believe. He does have bad hair though, doesn't he?
We're at #6 in the charts this week on his 42nd week of a 69 week run, with it having peaked at #4 in his 26th week. It managed three more weeks later in '91 and that was it's lot - it's very much of its time and whilst I'm sure some people have fond memories of it, I doubt it has too many visits these days. The top five this week were Madonna, Elton John, Cliff Richard, The Three Tenors and Phil Collins (all live or compilation albums for Xmas) and there are no new entries in the entire chart this week - that's going to change soon enough!
Wikipedia has very little on such a successful album. It was his sixth album (he's up to 24 now!) - did you know he started off playing hard rock stuff before he worked out what would earn him the cold hard cash. He also worked as Paula Abdul's babysitter for a bit and his first album was called Michael Bolotin because that's his real name - the trivia is coming thick and fast today. The album also uses 22 backing singers - some of whom are surprisingly well known including Richard Marx, Jocelyn Brown, Robin Clark (she sang on Bowie's "Young Americans") and Syreeta Wright (Stevie Wonder's ex-wife). This album was met somewhat frostily by the critics (although some did manage to find some nice things to say about it) but the public didn't care and bought it in their droves, with it selling six million copies in the US alone.
"Customers also listened to" Richard Marx, Curtis Stigers, Peter Cetera and Glenn Medeiros - it's hard to imagine any of those guys denting the charts these days but there was certainly a market for that kind of thing back then. And whilst it's easy to be sniffy about it, he's giving some people what they want and there's certainly some skill involved in doing so - and it's perfectly listenable, so I can't find it in my heart to be rude about it. I won't be heading back to it though.
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