Phil Collins was walking down a city street when he saw a man begging with two children beside him. By then, the British drummer and singer had already sold millions of records, but the scene stayed with him, and he turned it into a soft-rock single called Another Day in Paradise. The song was released on October 23, 1989, as the first single from his album ...But Seriously, put out through Virgin Records.
From Homeless to a sermon
The song's working title was Homeless, and that is exactly what Collins wrote about. He had also seen people sleeping on a street grill after one of his concerts, and both images pushed him to write a lyric told from a third-person view: a narrator watches a man ignore a homeless woman and asks, "Oh Lord, is there nothing more anybody can do?" The direct appeal to God made the song feel like a sermon wrapped in a gentle pop melody, and Collins wrote the words and music himself.
For the recording, Collins handled vocals, keyboards, drums, and even programmed a Roland TR-808 drum machine. He also brought in David Crosby for backing vocals, a collaboration that had almost happened years earlier on Collins's first solo album Face Value, but Crosby could not attend those sessions. The single version ran four minutes and forty-seven seconds, while the album cut stretched to five minutes and twenty-two seconds.
Four weeks atop the Hot 100
The song became a chart phenomenon. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 23, 1989, and stayed there for four weeks, making it the seventh and final solo number-one hit of Collins's career. It was also the last chart-topper of the 1980s and the first of the 1990s in the United States. In Britain it climbed to number two, and it topped charts in Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Portugal, and West Germany.
The success brought Collins a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1991, with Hugh Padgham sharing the honor as co-producer. But the song also opened a sharp debate. Some critics said a wealthy rock star had no right to sing about poor people, and others accused Collins of profiting from homelessness. Collins pushed back, arguing that seeing the same streets as everyone else meant money did not cut him off from reality.
The criticism never fully faded. Years later, writers kept calling the song out: one magazine named it the worst song about homelessness ever written, and a British critic described it as a banal ballad about a multimillionaire noticing poverty from a gilded limousine. Yet Jamie Wales of Gigwise pointed out that Collins raised money for charities helping homeless people and doubled the amount from his own pocket, a detail often left out of the attacks.
Another Day in Paradise remains a strange artifact: a global hit that made people hum about suffering while arguing about who gets to speak. Collins saw a man with two children and wrote a song that topped the American chart for four weeks and won a Grammy. The man on the street never got a name, but the song he inspired is still argued about thirty-seven years later.
The man on the street never got a name, but the song he inspired is still argued about thirty-seven years later.