Donna Lewis "I Love You Always Forever"

Why is this song so great and where has it been all my life? Breakdown sounds proto-HAIM to me, but really it seems to anticipate a lot of millennial sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5wizkr-shY

In the U.S., the song peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for nine weeks during the summer of 1996, kept from number one by Los Del Rio's "Macarena".

Yeah, this song was enormous and is still a regular earworm 21+ years later.

ugh i’m still not ready to appreciate this one yet. annoyed me then, annoys me now

#1 song dedication request of the Delilah radio show

it's a classic. and i've seen so much love for it on ilm and other ilm-adjacent spaces! what i tend to wonder is why it wasn't so beloved (commercial success) at the time of its release.

i loved it as an indie pop-hating teen and i love it now

my memory of this is that it was audio wallpaper, it was playing everywhere, constantly for what felt like years

it makes me think of clothing stores

idk this was pretty ubiquitous at the time. nowadays its one of those songs that causes me to freeze up a bit, it's so tied to me being a confused 11 year old and I haven't sought it out since. I thought it was Merril Bainbridge for a while but it turns out she did that *other* song. there's like this weird side genre of ethereal, dreamy 90s pop that includes songs like this, "I Want You" by Savage Garden and "Runaway" by Janet Jackson, don't know how to describe it exactly

Makes me think of Walmart. I lived in a small town at the time and the only thing to do in the middle of the night was go to Walmart and I debated whether or not I should buy this cd 5 or 6 times before I actually bought it.

I shouldn't have bought it, but I still have <3 for this jam.

Heard this in the wild the other day, at a CVS or the grocery or something, felt like the first time it'd surfaced in a while. Liked it OK back in the day, like it OK now. It's sweet and unobtrusive.

in my head it quickly morphs into Savage Garden’s I Want You, same tempo/word salad kinda deal

Hell yeah I love this song

Makes me think of Lowe's, because I worked there when this came out and it was in constant rotation on the satellite station in the store. Good to know it evokes a similar big box retail chain sense memory in others.

i remember seeing the video on muchmusic as a 12 year old in 96, love this song

In my head this song is the mid-point between Cocteau Twins circa Heaven or Las Vegas and "A Thousand Miles".

vegemitegrrl otm

This sounds like something produced in 1989-90 that happened to come out in '96, IMO.

ugh i’m still not ready to appreciate this one yet. annoyed me then, annoys me now

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl),

otm

Yet I love "I Want You."

Well "I Want You" is basically a Roxette song.

It's v much in the late Fleetwood Mac wheelhouse imo?

In the mid-90s, I was transitioning from the youthful consumption and appreciation of all pop music to the (arguable) development of critical faculties. That whole musical era was defined by an intentional shift toward, eg, Orb and Softies albums with top-40 radio relegated to tinny background accompaniment at work or while attempting to study in the student union. It evokes a more melancholic nostalgia: the slow shift toward adulthood, the dawning realization of my lost innocence and impending mortality, the acknowledgement that saying you'll always love someone forever is a total farce when you can't even make it through an entire semester away from one another without everything falling apart. You're a fool, Donna. A goddamn fool.

her voice has that edible quality like Stevie Nicks'

oh dear my post above said "(commercial success)" when i really meant "(commercial success aside)", i am incapable of writing anything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVDVd9ViDQE

this remix on the single release is lovely, where the original is bright this is more a quiet jubilation - it reminds me of Morgan Geist "Lullaby" of all things

you've got
the most unbelievable blue eyes
i've ever seen

you've got
me almost melting away

I was visiting my sister who had just got married and moved to Nashville when this song came out. Around the same time every morning, right around the time we'd all be waking up and making breakfast, the local crossover-country station would play this song. Total earworm, incredibly minimal for mid-90s pop. I wrote somewhere in the archives about 10-15 years ago that it would make for an incredibl microhouse remix.

This song was pretty much the soundtrack to one of my favorite summers in my life, this song sounds like feeling in love to me.

Memories aside, the actual song is very cool with it’s minimal instrumentation and hypnagogic atmosphere. The only part I don’t really like is the bridge in the final third of the song which kind of ruins the vibe set in the verse and the chorus.

I think this might easily be a top 10 pop song of the 90’s for me. Listening to it right now and it has aged rather gracefully compared to other pop hits from the time

i feel like i heard about the be still here, and yet... can't find anything. anyway it is the donna lewis ambient album and it is incredible

blue planet also a really solid record with jams

be still is pretty cool, yeah. i made a post about it on the 'left-field records worth checking out by musicians you wouldn't expect' thread

i do remember some keepers from blue planet as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7POTmGoNjw

yeah! like this absolute banger

never had any interest in what her other stuff sounds like but if she sounds like Opus III I'm in

Wow the piano playing in Love Him is phenomenal. Plus lovely chords, housey beats, and edge-of-a-whisper vocals. I'm getting big Carly Rae Jepsen vibes actually; it's kind of proto-Warm Blood. Guess I need to check her out properly. I Love You Always Forever used to bore the crap out of me as a kid, but I've come to appreciate it in recent years. It's all about PATIENCE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVDVd9ViDQE

this remix from the original single release, I love it - it's like Morgan Geist and Larry Levan together got their hands on it

also seems to have gone unmentioned that all of Now In A Minute is pretty great

some things go without saying j/k but yeah it is a really good record

Haim should cover this, maybe in the style of that remix^^^

all of her albums are good

she put out a new one this year and it's kind of fucking amazing idk https://open.spotify.com/album/1P8m4aGMM0c6ebJoIJWY5d