One Hit Wondering – A’me Lorain

One Hit Wondering is a series of columns where I listen to the album of a one hit wonder, and find three songs, other than the hit, that people should hear. 

In the spring of 1990 a fresh face in the pop scene named A’Me Lorain was climbing the chart with her debut single, “Whole Wide World.”

Having a pop meets New Jack Swing sound, and a remarkably catchy, borderline earworm, chorus with A’me wanting to tell the “Whole Wide World” about her guy, the song reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Whole Wide World” was actually featured on two albums – A'me Lorain & The Family Affair’s 1989 RCA Records release, Starring In ... Standing in a Monkey Sea, and on the soundtrack to the 1989 romantic comedy True Love (which starred Annabella Sciorra, who would later go on to play Gloria Trillo on The Sopranos).

In fact, it even had two music videos, one being incredibly colorful, and totally representative of an era that still had one foot in the ‘80s with the other moving forward into the ‘90s, and a second that was more plot-based.

The former has been receiving airplay on MTV Classic of late, and as an aside, I hope everyone involved in it still has the outfits in their closet!

Funky fashion aside, A’me Lorain & The Family Affair were true to their name, with her her brother Freddy Trujillo on bass, and her then-husband Victor Indrizzo playing guitar and drums.

In a 2024 interview with the website Lonesome Highway, Freddy revealed that their rise wasn’t exactly planned.

“My sister accidentally became a pop star,” he said, “She was singing for this guy called Elliot Wolff, and also used to ghost tracks before AutoTune for people who weren’t great singers. She would sing along with them, and Elliot would ghost her vocals, and fix the pitch. She sang a song with him that became a hit, and I wrote some songs with her, and I probably made the most money I’ve ever made in the music business.”

Elliot Wolff was having himself a heck of a run at the time, having written and produced “Straight Up” and “Cold Hearted” for Paula Abdul right before “Whole Wide Wold,” and a handful of years earlier he co-wrote Johnny Gill’s “Super Love.”

The follow up to “Whole Wide World,” was “Follow My Heartbeat,” but it fizzled out quickly, peaking at #72, at which point Starring In ... Standing in a Monkey Sea floated off, and A’me Lorain disappeared from the scene for over a decade.

In 2003 A’me Lorain reappeared, but under her real name, Amy Trujillo, in a most unlikely place – on a DJ Muggs album. Yes, that DJ Muggs, of Cypress Hill, and Soul Assassins fame. The project was titled Dust, and Muggs’ concept for it was to not be constrained by genre

Amy wrote and performed the vocals for half a dozen of the songs, including the song “I Know,” which starts off with a lone electric guitar before moving into a sound that has a strong Portishead vibe.

The album also featured two songs written and performed by Josh Todd of Buckcherry.

To say the lineup was unique would be an understatement!

After her work on Dust it would be another eleven years before the whole wide world hear from Amy, who seems to be just as good at disappearing acts, as she is at music.

Amy’s brother Freddy, however, took no such breaks. He’s currently the bass player for The Delines, he did two tours playing bass with Richmond Fontaine, and he’s also been working as a solo artist since the early ‘00s.

It would be a project of Freddy’s that would bring Amy back out of her musical hibernation.

The album, released in 2014 under the name Trujillo, was titled Amexica, and Amy provided backing vocals for two of the songs, including the title track.

Working on music again must’ve given her a bug for wanting to give it another go, because a year later, under her previous performance moniker, A’me released three singles – “Your Ghost,” “You Said” (feat. Lükka), and “‘Till you See” – all of which are gorgeous pop songs.

It’s not just that these songs could’ve competed with anything on the radio at the time, they were outright better than a lot of what was receiving airplay, and had they had the proper backing the rest of this story would be about A’me Lorain’s return to the spotlight.

Unfortunately, the backing wasn’t there, and while these songs are out in the world, you have to seek them out to find them.

A’me Lorain returned to musical hibernation after releasing those three singles, and while at one point her brother said she was working on an album, it has yet to come to fruition.

It would be great if we eventually heard from her again, but since she has zero online presence, there’s no telling what she’s up to. She could be perfectly happy being away from music, or just making music for personal enjoyment. If that’s the case, hey, good for her for living her best life.

Rewinding back to when she was Starring In ... Standing in a Monkey Sea, I spun A’me Lorain’s debut – and as of now only – album, and found three songs, other than “Whole Wide World,” that you should hear.

“Letter ‘C’ Card”

The subject matter of “Letter ‘C’ Card” is rough – A’me singing about being so poor as a kid that she was on the discount school lunch list, but the music is incredibly funky. A mixture of Janet Jackson meets Prince, it’s an absolute jam that you can feel in your soul.

There was a time when songs with a meaning were in heavy rotation, and this absolutely should’ve been one of them.

“Time You Take”

Much like “Whole Wide World,” “Time You Take” is a pop meets New Jack Swing song, and it probably should’ve been the follow up single, because it’s pure early ‘90s goodness that would’ve seen heavy rotation on Top 40 radio.

Hearing A’me’s vocals on this song, she sounds like she had future pop star written all over her. Someone at the label definitely dropped the ball.  

“TheGreatBigEpicDownSyndromeStoryHeartPartOne”

OK, so the title of this one doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the song sounds nothing like the rest of the album, but the latter is what makes it so interesting. With a strong rock influence, “TheGreatBigEpicDownSyndromeStoryHeartPartOne” had the potential to allow A’me to expand to any number of genres of music. I guess technically she did later in her career, so maybe this album cut can be viewed as a bit of a foreshadowing. A really awesome sounding foreshadowing.

Until next time, here’s to discovering more great music from one hit wonders!