" Lonely People " is a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Dan Peek and Catherine Peek and recorded by America .
18-434: "Lonely People" was the second single release from America's 1974 album Holiday . "Lonely People" reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 , the Peeks' only credited song to reach that chart's top 10, and was America's second number one on the Easy Listening chart, where it stayed for one week in February 1975. "Lonely People" was not automatically earmarked for the Holiday album: Dan Peek unsuccessfully submitted
36-529: A demo of the song for John Sebastian to consider recording. "Lonely People" was written as an optimistic response to the Beatles ' song " Eleanor Rigby ". Dan Peek considered "Eleanor Rigby" an "overwhelming" "picture...of the masses of lost humanity, drowning in grey oblivion" and would recall being "lacerated" on first hearing the lyrics of its chorus which run "All the lonely people: where do they all come from?...where do they all belong?". "Lonely People"
54-471: A database engineer, Vladimir Bogdanov , to design the All Music Guide framework, and recruited his nephew, writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine , to develop editorial content. In 1993, Chris Woodstra joined the staff as an engineer. A "record geek" who had written for alternative weeklies and fanzines, his main qualification was an "encyclopedic knowledge of music". 1,400 subgenres of music were created,
72-471: A feature that became central to the site's utility. In a 2016 article in Tedium , Ernie Smith wrote: "AllMusic may have been one of the most ambitious sites of the early-internet era—and it's one that is fundamental to our understanding of pop culture. Because, the thing is, it doesn't just track reviews or albums. It tracks styles, genres, and subgenres, along with the tone of the music and the platforms on which
90-406: A hot arranger, thinking about all the stuff he's done. There were several other people we wanted to use, but that idea sort of flashed and George was available." Holiday was the recording debut of America's longtime drummer Willie Leacox, who is in the car in the cover photo. In his AllMusic review music critic Mike DeGagne noted the effect of George Martin's production on the album as well as
108-862: Is the fourth studio album by the American folk rock band America , released on the Warner Bros. Records label in June 1974. The album was produced in London by George Martin , the first of six consecutive albums he produced with America. The album was a big hit in the US, reaching number 3 on the Billboard album chart and being certified gold by the RIAA . It produced two hit singles: " Tin Man ", which reached number 4 on
126-501: The Billboard singles chart and went to number 1 on the adult contemporary chart , and " Lonely People ", which peaked at number 5 on the Billboard singles chart and also hit number 1 on the adult contemporary chart. Several other songs received radio airplay on FM stations playing album tracks, including "Baby It's Up To You" and "Another Try". The album was also released on Quadrophonic reel-to-reel tape. Band member Dewey Bunnell
144-476: The database was first made available on the Internet in 1994. AllMusic is owned by RhythmOne . AllMusic was launched as All-Music Guide by Michael Erlewine , a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar and musician". He became interested in using computers for his astrological work in the mid-1970s and founded a software company, Matrix, in 1977. In the early 1990s, as CDs replaced LPs as
162-508: The dominant format for recorded music, Erlewine purchased what he thought was a CD of early recordings by Little Richard . After buying it, he discovered it was a "flaccid latter-day rehash". Frustrated with the labeling, he researched using metadata to create a music guide. In 1990, in Big Rapids, Michigan , he founded All Music Guide with a goal to create an open-access database that included every recording "since Enrico Caruso gave
180-640: The industry its first big boost". The first All Music Guide , published in 1992, was a 1,200-page reference book, packaged with a CD-ROM, titled All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums & Tapes: The Expert's Guide to the Best Releases from Thousands of Artists in All Types of Music . Its first online version, in 1994, was a text-based Gopher site. It moved to the World Wide Web as web browsers became more user-friendly. Erlewine hired
198-566: The music is sold. It then connects that data together, in a way that can intelligently tell you about an entire type of music, whether a massive genre like classical, or a tiny one like sadcore ." In 1996, seeking to further develop its web-based businesses, Alliance Entertainment Corp. bought All Music from Erlewine for a reported $ 3.5 million. He left the company after its sale. Alliance filed for bankruptcy in 1999, and its assets were acquired by Ron Burkle 's Yucaipa Equity Fund. In 1999, All Music relocated from Big Rapids to Ann Arbor , where
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#1732790683459216-490: The rebound from the failure of Hat Trick , writing "this album as a whole ascertained that the group was definitely showing their true potential once more." with: Shipments figures based on certification alone. AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG ) is an American online music database . It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands . Initiated in 1991,
234-532: The sale, and as Rovi from 2009 until 2016). In 2012, AllMusic removed all of Bryan Adams ' info from the site per a request from the artist. In 2015, AllMusic was purchased by BlinkX, later known as RhythmOne . The AllMusic database is powered by a combination of MySQL and MongoDB . The All Media Network produced the All Music Guide: The Definitive Guide (at first released as The Experts' Guide ), which includes
252-431: The song "with words to the effect" "that Jesus is the answer to loneliness". On the advice of a fan, Peek rewrote the lyrics of the song to convey a pro-Christian message and he recorded a revised version of "Lonely People" for his 1986 album Electro-Voice . This version changed the original lyrics "And ride that highway in the sky" and "You never know until you try" to "And give your heart to Jesus Christ." Peek's version
270-407: The staff expanded from 12 to 100 people. By February of that year, 350,000 albums and two million tracks had been cataloged. All Music had published biographies of 30,000 artists, 120,000 record reviews and 300 essays written by "a hybrid of historians, critics and passionate collectors". In late 2007, AllMusic was purchased for $ 72 million by TiVo Corporation (known as Macrovision at the time of
288-459: Was released as a single in 1986 and became a hit on contemporary Christian music stations. Jars of Clay recorded "Lonely People" for their 2003 album Who We Are Instead . Their version was featured on The WB TV series Everwood and was on the 2004 Everwood soundtrack album. In 2024, Christian folk singer J.J. Heller recorded "Lonely People" for her album I Dream of You: HOME . Holiday (America album) Holiday
306-488: Was thrilled at the prospect of working with George Martin as producer. He was quoted as saying that it "was great working with George. It was like we knew each other. We were familiar with the Beatles , of course, and we had that British sense of humor." In a separate interview, Dan Peek recalled to Circus magazine: "Gerry (Beckley) had been in England, and we'd talked about using George Martin as our producer. He's such
324-608: Was written within a few weeks of Dan Peek's 1973 marriage to Catherine Maberry-Peek: "I always felt like a melancholy, lonely person. And now [upon getting married] I felt like I’d won." The lyrics of "Lonely People" advise "all the lonely people": "Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup", a metaphor which Dan Peek thus explains: "It's possible to drink from another's well of experience...and be refreshed." Record World described it as being "about solitude and salvation." After Dan Peek left America in 1977, he recalled performing "Lonely People" to close his concerts, introducing
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