By winning five Juno Awards this year, The Weeknd has upped his career total of Juno wins to 22. Only one artist in Juno history has won more awards: That’s the great Anne Murray, who has picked up 25 over the years.
Watching The Weeknd close in on Murray’s long-held record echoes the way Beyoncé closed in on – and this year surpassed – classical conductor Sir Georg Solti’s record as the all-time Grammy Award winner. Even if Murray’s record is eventually toppled, the fact she has held it so long speaks volumes. (The artists who are next up on the Juno leaderboard are also global superstars: Bryan Adams is in third place with 21 Junos, while Celine Dion is in fourth place with 20.)
Murray’s collection of Junos includes back-to-back awards for both album of the year and single of the year for 1980-81. She took the album awards with New Kind of Feeling and Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits, and the single prizes with “I Just Fall in Love Again” and “Could I Have This Dance.”
Murray was one of the top pop/country crossover artists of the 1970s and ’80s. She topped the Billboard Hot 100 once (with “You Needed Me” in 1978) and the Hot Country Songs 10 times. She won a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance with “You Needed Me” and for best female country vocal performance three times, with “Love Song,” “Could I Have This Dance” and “A Little Good News.”
Murray was best known for ballads, such as the exquisitely sad “Broken Hearted Me,” but she also had some midtempo hits, including covers of The Beatles’ sassy “You Won’t See Me” and The Monkees’ endearing “Daydream Believer.”
Murray also had a wonderfully dry sense of humor in concert. When a fan would yell out a request, she would counter with a dry “Not yet. First, I want to work you up to feverish pitch.”
Here are nine things to know about Anne Murray.
“Snowbird” made No. 8 in September 1970. It brought her two Grammy nominations – best contemporary vocal performance, female and best new artist. She lost both awards (to Dionne Warwick and the Carpenters, respectively), but she went on to win four Grammys. And she landed a performance slot on that first live Grammy telecast in March 1971, where she sang James Taylor’s song of the year nominee, “Fire and Rain.”
She reached the chart with versions of the Fab Four’s “You Won’t See Me,” “Day Tripper” and “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You.” The acts were Capitol Records labelmates, though The Beatles broke up in 1970, just as Murray’s career took off.
Loggins wrote “Danny’s Song,” which Murray took to No. 7 on the Hot 100 in April 1973. He co-wrote “Love Song,” which was a No. 12 hit for Murray in March 1974. Murray later had a country hit with Kenny’s cousin, Dave Loggins. Their collab, “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do,” topped Hot Country Songs in December 1984.
She followed Olivia Newton-John and Linda Ronstadt in accomplishing the feat, and preceded k.d. lang.
The other nominees for best pop vocal performance, female were Olivia Newton-John for “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” Donna Summer for “MacArthur Park,” Carly Simon for “You Belong to Me” and Barbra Streisand for her solo recording of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (which was released before her duet version with Neil Diamond). So was Murray’s Grammy win a huge upset? Not at all: “You Needed Me” was the only single by a woman to receive a record of the year nomination that year. Murray competed with Billy Joel (who won), Bee Gees, Gerry Rafferty and Chuck Mangione.
“Could I Have This Dance” topped the Hot Country Songs chart in November 1980 and reached No. 33 on the Hot 100. It was the third No. 1 country hit to emerge from the soundtrack, following Mickey Gilley’s remake of “Stand by Me” and Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love.” The soundtrack topped Top Country Albums for eight weeks. The soundtrack and the John Travolta/Debra Winger film didn’t exactly do for country music what Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees-dominated soundtrack had done for disco in 1977-78, but it got partway there. If Fever was a home-run as a cultural phenomenon, this was at least a base hit.
She won both awards with “A Little Good News” and the album of the same name. It was her second single of the year nod, following “You Needed Me.”
The title of Murray’s 1981 album posed the philosophical question, Where Do You Go When You Dream. Nearly four decades later, the title of Billie Eilish’s debut album posed a similar question, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Sometimes great artists – even from different generations and genres – think alike.