"After All" by Cher & Peter Cetera

"After All" by Cher & Peter Cetera

Peak: 6

Year: 1989

Year end position: 79

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/16

Chronological Songs by Artist: 11/16

Video?: No

Wikipedia?:  Yes:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_All_%28Cher_and_Peter_Cetera_song%29

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:  http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cher/afterall.html

I like it when there you can find a pattern of naming in this blog.  We had a brief one earlier with the three songs that were about the topic of addiction.  Today starts a 6-day run of songs that start with the word "After".  I am a fan of using prepositional phrases as song titles.  Up until now, we've only had one ("Across the River").  I like it as a convention because I think it immediately sets up a story line for the song.  In "Across the River", the phrase was describing a place.  In the "After" songs, the title will be describing a time.  Today's song is about as generic a time frame as there can be.  Other songs describe being after specific events, but today's is just about after everything has completed.

Today also marks one the first song that was billed as a duet.  In "Addictive", we had Truth Hurts & Rakim, but Rakim was a guest rapper on the song.  In today's song, Cher and Peter Cetera are singing together throughout the song.  Often times, they switch singing every other line.  They also sing the chorus together.  For the purposes (and ease for me), I decided to only list one act as the main singer for the song.  That's grossly unfair to the person that I left off, but it also made my life a lot easier since I am able to tabulate statistics more easily when there is only singer listed per song.  For all songs where I did this, I only took the first person listed on the song as the main artist.  That means, for statistical purposes I have this as a song by Cher.  Where that becomes important is when I'm figuring out who makes it into the Hall of Fame.  Cher has 16 Top 20 songs, so she makes it pretty easily with or without this song.  Peter Cetera gets left off, so he is only credited with 3 top 20 songs (although I have him credit as the main singer on "Next Time I Fall", so Amy Grant gets screwed on that one).  Cher's 16 songs put her T51 on the list of acts that have had the most top 20 songs, placing her in the elite company of Fleetwood Mac, Gladys Knight and the Pips and Bruce Springsteen.  This song is part of a late career renaissance for Cher.  She hadn't had any top 20 hits from 1979-1988 before charting with 7 from 1988-1991.  Those 7 songs tie her with George Michael, Taylor Dayne and Roxette for the 9th most over that time frame.

This song is also the 3rd song we've had from a movie.  This song came from the movie "Chances Are".  I don't have much recollection of this movie other than it was a romantic comedy.  Apparently, it starred Robert Downey Jr. and Cybill Shepherd and currently has a 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  This song was nominated for an Oscar but eventually lost to "Under the Sea" from the Little Mermaid.  It was performed at the ceremony by Peabo Bryson and Melissa Manchester.  I was a little surprised to see that there is no evidence that Cher and Peter Cetera had ever sang this song together.  They even recorded their parts in separate studios, and were spliced together later.

The lyrics to the song are right at home in a romantic comedy, although they lean much, much heavier on the romantic side than they do on the comedy side.  The "After All" that the song refers to is that after everything the couple has been through they wind up together in the end.  In the movie, I guess someone's love interest comes back from the dead in the form of another person, which seems like it might cause some issues and inspires the line "angels that were rescued from the fall".  If you don't take that line at face value, this song works to describe any relationship where there has been some kind of turmoil.  I think that's part of the reason that this song is used in wedding ceremonies.  The time described in the song could very easily be describing two people at a wedding.  The song is a triumph of love over obstacles between two people.  Like I said, heavy on the romance.

I guess it also makes sense if you know that Cher and Peter Cetera never performed this song together that there was also no music video for this song.  That is a somewhat strange decision, especially for 1989.  It didn't seem to adversely  affect the song, since it made it all the way to #6 on the charts and was the 79th biggest song of 1989.  If you do go to YouTube, you can probably find a lot of homemade wedding videos set to this song.   Those may be better than any music video that was just thrown together with video clips from the movie.