"Crush" — Jennifer Paige
The summer-of-1998 single that got onto the radio before its singer had a publicity photo: a Los Angeles station started playing it in May, it reached number three on the Hot 100 by September and number one in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and it left Jennifer Paige known everywhere for one enormous hit.
In April 1998, soon after Paige recorded "Crush," her producer Andy Goldmark played it for the programmers at KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, who put it on the air within days. In the first week of May KIIS became the first station playing it, and it climbed without any of the usual machinery. "We had no pictures, photography, hadn't gotten it mastered or mass-produced it, nothing," Paige said. Her label, Edel, pressed an initial 20,000 copies that sold out, and by summer it was the station's most requested song. Goldmark had written it with Mark Mueller, Berny Cosgrove and Kevin Clark, drawing on Paige's own romantic life, and the single was formally released on June 9, 1998, with a video directed by David Hogan.
It was a genuine worldwide hit. In the United States it peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for four consecutive weeks in September, went gold and sold 700,000 copies by the end of the year. It spent two weeks at number one in Australia and five in Canada, topped the chart in New Zealand, hit number four in Britain and France and the top ten in much of Europe. Billboard's reviewer praised Paige for "oozing smoldering sensuality without resorting to typical groans and moans," using a flexible range that dropped to a low murmur and soared to lilting high notes within seconds, which is the whole trick of the record: a song about not caring that sounds like caring very much.
Her self-titled debut album followed in August 1998 with the singles "Sober" and "Always You," the latter reaching number six on Billboard's dance chart, and a second album, Positively Somewhere, came in 2001. By October 2003 she had parted with both Hollywood Records and Edel, which promptly issued a hits collection. She kept working, recording a 2008 French-language duet with Lââm and crowdfunding a 2017 album, but "Crush" is the song she is known for, covered by Jai Paul in 2019 and folded into a Katy Perry medley in 2025, still the sound of a 1998 car radio in the last month of summer.
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