#1398: Ana

80s Snapshot:

• Number of songs on Hot 100: 1
• Highest peak position: 94
• Cumulative weeks on Hot 100: 3

Born in 1974, Ana Maria Rodriguez is one of, if not the youngest artists we will encounter in this journey. She’s also already our second act in fewer than 50 entries who built their path to the charts on sounding like Madonna.

Ana moved from her birthplace of Cuba to Miami at the age of 5 and was already signed to her first record deal by the age of 10. From Stevie Wonder to Michael Jackson, Stacy Lattisaw, Tevin Campbell and many others, there is a time-honored tradition of acts whose novelty is their young age with a talent that resonates beyond their years. In Ana’s case, Parc Records saw great promise in a pre-teen Madonna sound-alike.

Billed simply as Ana, her self-title debut album for Parc took a few years to put together, ultimately releasing in 1987 shortly after her 13th birthday. The lead single “Shy Boys” quickly became a success in dance clubs, making its debut on both the club play and sales charts in mid-June. On the 7/11/1987 charts, the song made its debut at #96 on the Hot 100, the same week it hit its respective peaks of #23 on the Dance Club Play chart and #9 on the Dance Singles Sales chart. It peaked at #94 on the Hot 100 a week later and fell to #97 in its third and final week on the chart. While “Shy Boys” and additional singles were successful in Japan, Ana’s debut album made no further noise in America.

Three years later and still just 16 years old, Ana returned in 1990 with her sophomore album Body Language. Lead single “Got To Tell Me Something” performed slightly better than its predecessor, peaking at #66 on the Hot 100 across a seven-week run. Also featuring two tracks written by fellow teen pop star Debbie Gibson and a duet with New Kids On The Block lead singer Jordan Knight, Body Language was able to make a slight dent on the albums chart as well, peaking at #191. As with her first album, Ana found even more success in Japan, performing the Gibson-penned “Everytime We Say Goodbye” at the 1990 Tokyo Music Festival (a competition coincidentally won by Wilson Phillips).

For over a decade, that represented the entirety of Ana’s musical output, stepping away from the music industry in her early adulthood. That hiatus ended in 2003 however, when she re-emerged under the name “Mía” with a Spanish-language album entitled Tentacíon. A pair of singles were released from the album and she garnered a nomination for Best New Artist – Pop at Univision’s annual Premio Lo Nuestro awards in 2004. While this brief renaissance still represents Ana’s most recent foray into the public eye, at just 51 years old she still has plenty of time to launch another comeback.

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