Eddie Rabbit "Suspicions" (1979)

Album: Loveline
Label: Elektra Records


When you're a country singer born second-generation Irish in Brooklyn and raised in suburban Jersey, you take whatever success you can get, even if you're the guy who wrote “Kentucky Rain.”

But for a while there, Eddie Rabbit had scads of success regardless "between “You Don't Love Me Anymore” in 1978 and “You Can't Run From Love” in 1983, 11 of the 13singles he put out topped the country chart, and almost all pushed the genre's definition in a manner schmaltzy enough to make purists' heads explode.

Which means, in his own way, Rabbit was a real innovator, hearing links between the reverb on pop-disco and Sun rockabilly records, and figuring out how to squeeze the Eagles and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” into the recipe to boot.

“Suspicions,” his most negative-spacious hit, about how when you're in love with a beautiful woman you watch your friends, was also his first to cross to the pop 20, and possibly the most quiet-storming, yacht-rocking country hit ever, from wafting woodwinds to blue-eyed soul falsettos on down. Just gorgeous "no wonder Tim McGraw revived it (gorgeously, too) in 2007.