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Bette Midler’s 14th studio album, It’s The Girls!, is on track to enter The Billboard 200 album chart right around #9. It will be the week’s second-highest new entry, behind Calvin Harris’s Motion, which is set to debut around #4. (Taylor Swift’s 1989 will easily hold on to the #1 spot, with second-week sales in the 385K range.)
Midler’s album includes girl-group favorites spanning 64 years, from the Boswell Sisters’s “It’s The Girl” (1931) to TLC’s “Waterfalls” (1995). Midler has had great success with girl-group remakes. Her first top 10 hit (in 1973) was a remake of the Andrews Sisters’s 1941 classic “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” She also scored later that same year with a cover of The Dixie Cups’s 1964 smash “Chapel Of Love.”
Midler’s album includes remakes of four songs that were #1 hits: The Chordettes’s “Mr. Sandman” (1954), The Shirelles’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (1961), The Supremes’s “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1966) and TLC’s aforementioned “Waterfalls.” Note: A fifth song on the album, The Andrews Sisters’s “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” (1938), would surely have been a #1 hit, but it predated the inception of Billboard’s first weekly chart in July 1940.
Midler’s album also includes a duet with Darlene Love on “He’s Sure The Boy I Love.” Though the 1963 hit was credited to The Crystals, the vocals were actually performed by Love & The Blossoms. Midler was the presenter when Love was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
In a fortuitous bit of timing, the album is released right on the (high) heels of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” which is a marvelous update on the classic girl-group sound.
It’s The Girls! is vying to become Midler’s sixth top 10 album. If it makes the top 10, this will be the fifth decade in which she has landed at least one top 10 album. Her first two albums, The Divine Miss M and Bette Midler, both made the top 10 in the 1970s. She has since returned to the top 10 with the Beaches soundtrack in the ‘80s, Some People’s Lives in the '90s and Bette Midler Sings The Peggy Lee Songbook in the 2000s. This album would extend her streak into the 2010s.
Midler’s album ties into a current trend in which albums by older pop superstars need to have strong thematic hooks. Barbra Streisand’s Partners is a collection of big-name duets. Barry Manilow’s My Dream Duets is a collection of duets with singers who are no longer with us. Aretha Franklin’s Aretha Franklin Sings The Great Diva Classics is a collection of songs made famous by female performers. If you can summarize the album concept in just a few words, as in these cases, it suggests that the concept is strong enough to be easily grasped and communicated.
Trivia Time:What’s the biggest girl group hit since 1940? It’s Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women Part 1,” which logged 11 weeks on top in 2000-'01. Tied for second place: The Andrews Sisters “Rum And Coca-Cola” (1945) and The McGuire Sisters’s “Sincerely” (1955). Each spent 10 weeks on top.
P.S. I borrowed today’s headline from The Who, which had a top 20 hit in 1981 titled “You Better You Bet.”
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