"After the Lovin'" by Engelbert Humperdink

Song 28:

"After the Lovin" by Engelbert Humperdink

Peak: 8

Year: 1976

Year end position: 61

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/6

Chronological Songs by Artist: 6/6

Video?: No

Wikipedia?:  Yes:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Lovin'

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:  http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/engelberthumperdinck/afterthelovin.html

So, we've reached song #5 of the "After" series of songs, and there doesn't seem to be much commonality to the songs other than that they all start with the same word and refer to a place in time.  Today's song doesn't share the same time space as the others either.  Today's song refers to the time immediately after sex.  Despite that, the song isn't even remotely racy.  If anything, it's sweet.  I will admit to being an unabashed fan of this song.  This song makes me smile every time I hear it.  It also happens to be sung in a key that I can sing, making it potentially a great go-to karaoke song for me.

I was looking at the career of Engelbert Humperdink, since this is the first song we have heard from him.  You may guess that Engelbert Humperdink isn't his real name, and you would be right.  He was born Arnold George Dorsey and decided to change his name in the mid 60s.  I couldn't find much about why he chose this particular name, but there was a person in history named Engelbert Humperdink.  He wrote the opera "Hansel & Gretel" in 1893 and was German.  I couldn't find any connection between these two people.  The best explanation I could find was that his manager did it, and he didn't protest.  It reminds me a little of the story that Elvis Costello tells of when he changed his stage name to Elvis.  Whatever reason, it seems to have worked because he had 6 top 20 hits (although only 2 made it to the top 10).

I was looking into the career of Engelbert Humperdink and it looks like there was a 6 year hiatus between his last hit (this one) and his next to last hit.  I was wondering how frequent that is in chart history.  It turns out that the distribution looks similar to the distribution of time between 1st and 2nd hits.  The average is around 2 years, and one standard deviation out puts it at about 5 years.  That make Engelbert Humperdink in the tail somewhere, but not too far into the tail.  I decided to create a metric to track the most unexpected/anticipated comebacks.  The metric multiplied the length of time between last and next to last songs by the number of top 20 hits the act had.  It's a totally bogus metric that doesn't really measure anything, but it does a pretty decent job of identifying comeback songs that may have popped up unexpectedly.  As of right now the top 5 using this metric were:

1. Michael Jackson ("Love Never Felt So Good" in 2014)

2. Roy Orbison ("You Got It" in 1989)

3. Perry Como (It's Impossible" in 1970)

4. Bee Gees ("One" in 1989)

5. James Brown ("Living in America" in 1986)

I think it's pretty fair that those songs were unexpected hits long after the primes of the acts that preformed them.  Maybe this metric isn't too bad after all.

Back to this song.  As I mentioned before, I love this song.  A big part of the reason I love it is because it's a meta-song.  The opening lines to the song are: "So I sing you to sleep / After the lovin' / With a song I just wrote yesterday".  What song was that?  It is the very song he is currently singing.  That's not the only place he does this.  Later on he sings "I know that my song isn't saying anything new".  He's singing about his song within his song.  That's some heavy songwriting yoga.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that he is singing this song to a woman after he has had sex with her.  That seems risqué, but I think this song is a great barometer of the times.  This song would have been totally unacceptable 10 years earlier.  In the free love 70s, this song seems quaint - even romantic.

Another part of the song that I absolutely love is the background singing.  It mainly shows up in the climactic third verse.  It is essentially the second verse, but with background singers.  My favorite part is when they sing "Your love is real / It makes me cry".  For some reason, I think it's strange to hear those particular lines being emphasized in that way.  I also like the third verse because of that slight crescendo it has.  I am a sucker for big finishes in songs.

There is a video for this song you can find on YouTube.  Engelbert is on a small stage in all his sideburned glory.  It is totally worth checking out.  Engelbert seems like a pretty cool customer in this video.  I will go on record saying that I love everything about this song.  It might be the best song we've had so far in my opinion.