“I’m also doing this”: The song Phil Collins wrote to get his credibility back
Every artist tends to be a victim of their past work in some respects. As cool as they may have seemed back in their prime, there are only so many avenues that one can go down before they start looking like a sellout who forgot about why they had picked up an instrument in the first place. And since Phil Collins was more omnipresent on the charts than most artists in the late 1980s, he wrote this song in an attempt to remind people why he should have been respected in the first place.
For a while, Collins seemed like the reason why Genesis had become a pop band. Looking through the timeline of their career, the moment that he stepped behind the microphone, the hit singles like ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Follow You Follow Me’ began gaining traction on the charts, and the artsy rock project that Peter Gabriel had started back in the day now seemed like a distant memory from the past.
But was he really that much of a sellout? Collins did have a lot of hit singles, but his first album behind the microphone, A Trick of the Tail, is not a commercial record by any stretch of the imagination. No matter how many people claim the band went downhill, songs like ‘Squonk’ and ‘Dance on a Volcano’ were never going to get radio play, and that’s because they still held onto the belief of being an albums-based group.
Even when Collins started making solo projects like Face Value, nothing was really supposed to be commercial material. Many of the songs on the record were written as a way to communicate with his estranged wife, and the fact that a track like ‘In the Air Tonight’ became so big was practically a happy accident.
Once they started bleeding over into Genesis and Collins got a whiff of pop success, it felt like everything had ground to a halt. Having a song like ‘In the Air Tonight’ in your arsenal is great, but if the song that gets people excited is ‘A Groovy Kind of Love’, don’t be surprised when the audience starts falling asleep halfway through the concert, either.
So when reaching the end of the 1980s, ‘Another Day in Paradise’ was Collins’s way of breaking out of his usual formula, saying, “’Another Day in Paradise’ was chosen because it was a bit different from what had gone on before. It would bring people back to the starting line of remembering what I’m about. I write ‘In the Air.’ I’m quite capable of writing a ‘Two Hearts,’ but let’s not forget I’m also doing this kind of stuff.”
Still, this song is far from the perfect career resurgence he sought. There are some great moments, but Collins’s next record, Both Sides, is a much better indicator of his talents, with most of the tracks being played only in the studio and even drawing on a few of his influences from the early Genesis days.
Although ‘Another Day in Paradise’ went a little harder than the easy listening that he had started with, Collins wasn’t about to go back to the offbeat time signatures that he cut his teeth with. He was still more than happy to stay in the pop lane, but at least this one didn’t have the same effect that a sleep aide has on most people.
