B-side "My Destination" Recorded 1980–1981 Genre Rock | Format 7-inch 45 RPM Studio Hideaway | |
Released September 26, 1986 (1986-09-26) | ||
"Amanda" is a power ballad by the rock band Boston written by Tom Scholz. The song was released as the first single from the band's third album, Third Stage, in 1986, a 6-year-delay after it was recorded.
Although the song did not have a promotional music video, "Amanda" became the band's highest charting single in the United States and Canada. In the United States, the single topped the Billboard Hot 100 in November, 1986, for two consecutive weeks (the band's only number 1 on the Hot 100), and topped for three consecutive weeks on the Mainstream Rock chart, in October of the same year, while in the latter the single topped RPM magazine's Top Singles and Adult Contemporary charts.
It was the band's first officially released single since 1978 and their first released by MCA Records. The 12-string guitar parts are played by Scholz.
Reception
In late 1984 a raw demo of the song was leaked to radio stations via a syndicated satellite feed. Despite the poor audio quality the first new studio Boston song to be heard in 6 years became the most requested song at AOR (Album-oriented rock) stations that played the bootleg. "Amanda" is a relatively rare example of a song that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in or after the 1980s without having a performance music video made for it. An interview for British television, made while the band was promoting the Third Stage album, does show a couple of minutes of a music video near the end. The band does not appear in that video, which intersperses shots of a model smiling for the camera with special effects footage of the band's spaceship logo flying over the Boston skyline. One shot shows the animated spaceship almost colliding with the John Hancock Tower. However, the single failed to chart on the U.K singles chart.
The song was eventually certified gold by the Canadian Recording Industry Association with sales of over 5,000 units.