Helen Reddy - You're My World (1977)

Another personal favorite...please enjoy!

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"You're My World" became a Top 20 hit in the US in 1977 via a remake by Helen Reddy introduced on Ear Candy, her ninth studio album, whose February 1977 recording at Brother Studios in Santa Monica was helmed by veteran producer Kim Fowley with the assistance of Earle Mankey with arranging/conducting duties carried out by David Carr. Ritchie Blackmore has been credited with playing guitar on Reddy's recording of "You're My World":Deep Purple, the group Blackmore had fronted, had been managed by Jeff Wald who in 1977 was Helen Reddy's manager and husband (Blackmore's name does not appear in the official credits listed on the Ear Candy album).

Although Reddy's eighth studio album Music, Music (1976) had been certified gold, its second single release "Gladiola" had been Reddy's first Billboard Hot 100 shortfall since her 1971 Hot 100 debut with "I Don't Know How to Love Him" (of Reddy's fifteen 1971-76 Hot 100 entries all but two had reached the Top 20 affording her ten Top 20 hits). Jeff Wald, then Reddy's husband and manager, would state in 1977: "Helen has enough hits to be established in the public mind...but it still shakes you when you're suddenly not on the charts". Wald therefore had not wanted Reddy's ninth studio album to be (quote) "just another Helen Reddy album[:] I let it be known on the street that whoever came to me with the right material, with a hit song, was going to produce Helen Reddy"..."I wanted hit singles and something a little different":"I called every publisher in town: listened to 800-900 songs";"I let a dozen producers walk into this office and play me a song. I called Kim Fowley and let him know I would like to hear from him, what his ideas were and of all the guys who walked into my office he had the most material that I liked":"He played me five songs, four of which I liked immediately".

Reddy would recall singing along to radio play of Cilla Black's 1964 hit version of "You're My World": (quote) "When it was suggested [in 1977] as a track for me to record, I leapt like a trout to the fly."

Reddy gave her debut televised performance of "You're My World" on the 6 May 1977 broadcast of The Midnight Special. During the year 1977 Reddy promoted "You're My World" via performances on five episodes of The Tonight Show.

A smash hit in Chicago (chart peak: #4), Reddy's "You're My World" otherwise failed to break in any first-tier metropolitan market: the track did reach #1 in Buffalo - where WKBW-AM would rank "You're My World" as the #5 hit of 1977 - and received moderate support in a number of regional markets, reaching a Billboard Hot 100 peak of #18 in July 1977. "You're My World" was thus Reddy's highest charting single since "Ain't No Way to Treat a Lady" almost two years previously, besting the #29 peak of "I Can't Hear You No More" the lead single off Reddy's precedent Music, Music album: however "You're My World" would prove to be Reddy's last Top 40 hit. With a debut on the Hot 100 dated 30 April 1977 and final appearance 24 September 1977, "You're My World" ties with Reddy's signature #1 hit "I am Woman" as the singer's longest-running Hot 100 hit. Commenting on the lengthy chart tenure of the Top Ten shortfall "You're My World", Jeff Wald would state: "As busy as [Capitol Records] are with ten [or] eleven acts with [rising chart hits] they didn't lose the Helen Reddy record, they didn't give up on it...There's not many [major labels] that would stay with the record of an established artist, not a new artist that they're trying to break, stay with a record for nineteen [or so] weeks like that and pound it and pound it and pound it."