It begins not with a drum fill or a horn blast but with a quiet, almost hesitant keyboard figure, and then a voice singing about a woman on the street, calling out to a man who walks straight past her. “Another Day in Paradise” is not the Phil Collins song most people expected in 1989. For four years he had been pop’s most reliable hit machine, the man behind “Sussudio” and “One More Night,” the drummer who had become a superstar. Then, at the very end of the decade, he released a slow, somber ballad about homelessness — and watched it become the last number one single of the 1980s and the first of the 1990s. It won the Grammy for Record of the Year, topped charts around the world, and started an argument that has never really ended: can a rich rock star sing about poverty without being accused of hypocrisy? The story of the song is the story of that question, and of a songwriter who, for once, wrote about something he could not dance his way out of.
To understand why the song mattered, you have to understand where Phil Collins stood in 1989. He was not a newcomer, and he was not a man in need of a hit. He was, by any measure, one of the biggest stars on the planet. Born in London in 1951, he had joined Genesis as their drummer in 1970, taken over as lead singer after Peter Gabriel’s departure, and built a solo career in parallel that, by the mid-1980s, had eclipsed the band itself. His 1985 album No Jacket Required had sold millions, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and given him a string of bright, danceable hits. He had sung the theme to the film Buster, produced records for other artists, and played both Live Aid concerts — London and Philadelphia — on the same day in 1985, flying across the Atlantic on the Concorde between them. He was everywhere, and he knew it. He later said he had become, in his own phrase, a little more trivialized than he wanted to be. The title of his next album said it all: …But Seriously. This time, he meant it.
The song that announced that change did not begin as a statement. By Collins’s own account, it began at the piano, almost by accident. He had been playing around with a chord progression — built, as he later noted, around D minor, which he called the saddest of chords — and recorded it onto a tape so he would not forget it. Then, listening back, he decided to see what would happen if he started singing. The words came out unbidden: a woman calls out to a man on the street, and the man pretends he does not hear her. Collins later insisted he had not set out to write a song about homelessness at all. “I didn’t set out to write a song about the homeless,” he said. “Those were just the words I happened to sing. It was only then that I decided that was what the song would be about.” It is a revealing admission, because it explains the song’s strange power. It does not sound like a lecture written to a brief. It sounds like something that surprised its own author.
But the words had somewhere to come from. Collins had been carrying the images for some time. On a visit to Washington, D.C., he had been struck by the sight of homeless people living within viewing distance of Capitol Hill, the seat of American power, and he called the contrast “an extraordinary contradiction.” He remembered an encounter with a homeless woman who had two children with her and was asking for financial help, and he remembered, with uncomfortable honesty, that he had walked straight past her. He remembered, too, seeing people sleeping on outdoor heating grates after one of his concerts. “What [the song] also deals with is people’s awkwardness with it,” he later explained. “When it happened to me, I just walked straight past. I thought, I’m doing the same thing as everybody else. I felt awkward… That’s what the song deals with, people just sort of starting to pretend it’s not happening.”
That awkwardness is the song’s real subject. “Another Day in Paradise” is sung in the third person, and that distance is deliberate. Collins does not sing as the homeless woman, and he does not sing as a preacher. He sings as an observer, watching a man cross the street to avoid a woman calling out for help, watching him whistle and pretend he cannot hear. The man is not a villain. He is, uncomfortably, most of us. And then comes the chorus, with its bitter irony: it is just another day for you and me in paradise. The word “paradise” does all the work. For the man walking past, the street is paradise, a comfortable world that keeps working. For the woman on the pavement, it is anything but. Collins even appeals directly to God in the lyric, asking whether there is nothing more anybody can do. It is, as he himself later described it, a very naive but heartfelt ballad — and its naivety is part of its honesty. It does not offer a policy. It offers a mirror.
The song had been given the working title “Homeless” while Collins was writing it, and in a sense it never stopped being that song. But the final title changed its meaning, turning a report about one group of people into a judgment on everyone else. It also connected, quietly, to Collins’s earlier work. He had already written about homelessness once before, for Genesis: “Man on the Corner,” from the band’s 1981 album Abacab, told a similar story of a lonely figure on the street that everyone ignores. “Another Day in Paradise” was the second song he had written on the subject, and this time he put his own name on it, alone, as the lead single of a solo album. That choice mattered. As the first single from …But Seriously, it told the world what kind of record this was going to be: slower, darker, and more serious than anything he had released since his early solo work.
The recording matched the mood. Sessions for …But Seriously took place between April and October 1989 at The Farm, Collins’s studio in Chiddingfold, Surrey, and at A&M Studios in Los Angeles. Collins co-produced the track with Hugh Padgham, his longtime engineer and collaborator, and he played most of it himself: keyboards, drums, and programmed drum machines, building a stripped-down, haunting arrangement that left plenty of empty space around the vocal. Argentine-born guitarist Dominic Miller, who would become one of Collins’s most trusted collaborators, played guitar, and the legendary session bassist Leland Sklar played bass. The single version used a shorter introduction than the album version, trimming the opening for radio. And then there was the guest voice that gave the record its quiet authority: David Crosby, who sang backing vocals. Collins had met Crosby at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden, and bringing him in was deliberate — Collins wanted to evoke the protest-folk era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the world of Crosby, Stills and Nash, even though, as he admitted, this was not really a protest song. Crosby’s harmony floats behind Collins’s lead like a conscience, and it is one of the reasons the record sounds less like a pop single and more like a witness statement.
The video, directed by Jim Yukich, was shot entirely in black and white, a stark choice that stripped away the gloss of Collins’s 1980s image. There were no dancers, no bright colors, no jokes. Just Collins singing, and images of the street. It was the visual equivalent of the song’s arrangement: nothing to hide behind.
Released on October 23, 1989, as the lead single from …But Seriously, “Another Day in Paradise” climbed with a steadiness that surprised even its maker. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 43 on the chart dated November 4, 1989, and rose through the Christmas season until, on December 23, 1989, it reached number one. It stayed there for four weeks, which gave it one of the most unusual distinctions in chart history: it was the final number one single of the 1980s and the first number one single of the 1990s. It was Collins’s seventh and final solo number one in America, and his fourth straight chart-topper at that point in his career. Around the world, the pattern repeated: it reached number one in Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, and number two in the United Kingdom, Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands. The album …But Seriously, released in November 1989, also reached number one on both sides of the Atlantic, and went on to produce further hits including “I Wish It Would Rain Down,” with Eric Clapton on guitar, “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven” and “Do You Remember?”
Then came the awards — and the argument. At the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards in February 1991, “Another Day in Paradise” won Record of the Year for Collins and Padgham, Collins’s only career win in that category. It was also nominated for Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, and Best Music Video, Short Form. Earlier, it had won British Single at the 1990 Brit Awards, where Collins also took home British Male Solo Artist. Collins and Crosby performed the song together at the 1991 Grammy ceremony, a performance later released on the 1994 album Grammy’s Greatest Moments Volume I. In 2009, Billboard ranked the song 86th on its list of the Greatest Songs of All Time.
But almost from the moment it became a hit, the song divided people. The charge, put most bluntly by singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, was that writing a song about the homeless without backing it up with action was exploitation. Blender magazine later called it the worst song ever about homelessness. Critics complained that a multi-millionaire pop star had no business singing about people sleeping on grates, and that the song’s gentle arrangement softened a subject that demanded anger. Collins answered the charge directly. “When I drive down the street, I see the same things everyone else sees,” he told The Times. “It’s a misconception that if you have a lot of money you’re somehow out of touch with reality.” And there was a fact his critics often missed: Collins collected money for homeless charities from fans at his concerts and then matched the total out of his own pocket, doubling what the audience had given. The song, in other words, was not the whole of his response. It was the part of it that happened to be on the radio.
That tension is why the song has lasted, and why it still makes listeners uncomfortable in a useful way. It is easy to dismiss “Another Day in Paradise” as a rich man’s guilt trip, and it is just as easy to praise it as a brave stand. The truth is more interesting, and it is written into the song itself. Collins does not exempt himself from the story. The man who walks past the woman is not some other person; by Collins’s own admission, that man was him, on the day he walked past a homeless woman with two children and felt awkward and did nothing. The song’s power comes from that confession, not from any claim to virtue. It asks its listeners to notice the moment they look away, and it admits that its singer has looked away too.
The song’s afterlife has been long and varied. Less than six months after the original’s release, the German dance act Jam Tronik covered it, reaching number nineteen on the UK Singles Chart in April 1990. In 2001, Brandy and Ray J recorded the most successful cover, for the Phil Collins tribute album Urban Renewal, and their version became a top ten hit across Europe and Australia, reaching number five in the United Kingdom. Reggae singer Dennis Brown cut a version in 1992, and electronic covers have followed since. But it is Collins’s original that still defines the song, and it is still the version that turns up whenever the subject of homelessness in pop music comes up — usually as both the best-known example and the most argued-over one. That is a strange kind of legacy, but it is an honest one. A song that nobody could ignore, about people everybody ignores, was always going to be argued about.
There is a final irony worth sitting with. “Another Day in Paradise” closed out a decade that had made Phil Collins one of the most famous people on earth, and it did so by asking him, and his audience, to look at the people the decade had left behind. The 1980s had been the era of big choruses and bigger videos, of wealth worn lightly and success worn loudly. Collins ended it with a quiet keyboard figure, a story about a woman on the street, and a question addressed to God. He never had another American number one after it. In a way, that is fitting. The song was not a career move. It was a conscience clearing its throat, in public, at the top of the charts, at the exact moment one decade became another. And it is still asking the same question, every time it plays: when she calls out to the man on the street, what will he do this time?
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the chorus lands. It is the sound of a pop star who had everything, stopping to notice the people who had nothing.