Welcome to today's edition of I Know That Song! We give you the background, the behind-the-scenes stuff you may not know about song you've heard many times.
Today’s singer was born in New York City, she attended the Manhattan School of Music for a year as a drummer before leaving to pursue a music career. She is a vegan and a long-time supporter of animal rights and environmental causes. She is a well-known social and political activist, supporting events promoting women in music and LGBT rights. She was also the only artist to take the stage barefoot at Waterfront Park in all of the years of our sister station's Z100's Last Chance Summer Dance.
She has two children, and her daughter, Esther was conceived using an embryo she had frozen 20 years earlier
She has said that she identifies as omnisexual, and although there were rumors she had dated Martina Navratilova and Jodie Foster, she denied those, saying, "I've never met any of the women I'm supposed to have had affairs with."
Today’s song when to Number 6 in 1994, and won an ASCAP award as the longest-running hit single on the Billboard charts in American music history at the time of its release spending 67 weeks on the Adult Contemporary chart, including six weeks at #1.
She was actually pursuing a career as percussionist, but her brief stint as a marimba and vibraphone player in Bryan Ferry’s band convinced her of a different career path. “I was breaking into what could have been the dream gig for a drummer/percussionist, and then I got fired...But I thought ‘You don’t really want to be a sideman and go on tour with these people. As wonderful as they are, that’s not who you are.’”
So she started writing lyrics on her wall. “And I thought that was really something big...Something big is about to happen...I was a total loser, D student, nothing ever really happened the way I wanted it to happen. I thought, ‘Something is coming out of you that you know is in there.” And her songwriting career began.
She wrote today's ballad about reminiscing about a faraway loved one as she goes to bed and hopes to see him again. It was written in memory of her father.
It appeared in Now and Then and the TV series (with Hawkins performing it as a guest star) in 1995 and the 1998 pilot of Dawson's Creek.
Today's song as you guessed is Sophie B. Hawkins. As I Lay Me Down.