Release and Reception
Merrill and Rubicam decided to record the song themselves for their second album Reel Life. Released as a single on June 10, 1988, the song became a hit in the United States, slowly climbing the charts and eventually reaching #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December, and #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart. Released in the UK on November 30, 1988, the song reached number 9 in the UK charts during January 1989, having entered the chart in December 1988. It also reached #35 on Australia's ARIA Charts in April 1989.
The song was used as the closing track to the 1990 movie Three Men and a Little Lady, and the single was re-released as a movie tie-in, with a new picture sleeve featuring the actors of the film. It peaked at #76 in the UK.
Johnny Loftus of Allmusic remarked that the song was "just classic", and that "the urgency as it drives toward its chorus is a clinic for durable songwriting."
Read more about this topic: Waiting For A Star To Fall
Famous quotes containing the words release and, release and/or reception:
“We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.”
—Elizabeth Drew (1887–1965)
“The steel decks rock with the lightning shock, and shake with the
great recoil,
And the sea grows red with the blood of the dead and reaches for his spoil—
But not till the foe has gone below or turns his prow and runs,
Shall the voice of peace bring sweet release to the men behind the
guns!”
—John Jerome Rooney (1866–1934)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)