Hurting Kind (I've Got My Eyes on You)

Album: Manic Nirvana (1990)
Charted: 45 46
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song, Robert Plant is singing to a damaged lover who's played him for a fool in the past. He's still after her, undeterred and seemingly unconcerned with her history. We never find out what comes of the advance.
  • Plant wrote the song with Phil Johnstone, Doug Boyle, Charlie Jones, and Chris Blackwell. Johnstone co-produced and played keyboard and guitars on Manic Nirvana (Plant's fifth solo album); Jones played bass. Boyle and Blackwell both played drums and some guitar. The group also backed Page on his fourth (Now and Zen) and sixth (Fate of Nations) solo albums. With his seventh album (Dreamland), Plant started recording with a new band, Strange Sensation.
  • Plant put the song out as a single in the US, the UK, Europe, and Mexico. The UK and US versions have "I Cried" as their B-sides. The European version includes the songs "Don't Look Back," "Oompah (Watery Bint)," and "One Love."

    He put them out through Es Paranza Records, which was a label created specifically for Plant's solo recordings and, for a time, the recordings of his supergroup The Honeydrippers, which included Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, Yardbird Jeff Beck, and other notable artists who'd flit in and out on a project-by-project basis.

    Plant released the vast majority of his solo albums on Es Paranza. Only his first album, Pictures at Eleven, went out through the Swan Song label that Zeppelin built in 1974 after their contract with Atlantic was up.
  • The song originally appeared as the opening track on Manic Nirvana and was released as a single from that album. It cracked #46 on the Billboard Hot 100, #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart, and #45 on the UK singles chart. In 2020, Plant included it on the compilation album Digging Deep: Subterranea.

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