Release and Reception
Released as the album's third single on January 1990, "Almost Hear You Sigh" made it halfway up the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, going slightly higher in the UK, and number one for one week on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks. The fact that the B-side was a Steel Wheels retread, "Break the Spell," and the Rolling Stones comeback 1989 North American tour had finished in December, the song got limited radio airplay. A music video was shot in black and white during the band's 1989 visit to Toronto for two shows at the Skydome.
USA Today music critic Edna Gundersen noted that Jagger's vocals and Richards' guitar playing sounded best on slower Steel Wheels tracks such as "Almost Hear You Sigh." SF Weekly marks it as one of the Stones' best ballads recorded after 1971. However, Parry Gettelman of the Orlando Sentinel marked the track's Grammy nomination as that of a relatively uninspiring song.
The song has been performed rarely since its release, being featured only on the Urban Jungle Tour leg of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour.
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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)