Taio Cruz's 'Break Your Heart' zooms to No. 1 on US Hot 100

Taio Cruz's 'Break Your Heart' zooms to No. 1 on Hot 100



Taio Cruz's Break Your Heart gets 273,000 downloads in one week, giving it the biggest-ever jump for an act's first charting single.




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By Steve Jones, USA TODAY
Watching his club-friendly Break Your Heart skyrocket to the top of the pop charts is déjà vu for British singer/songwriter Taio Cruz.
The song, which last week entered Billboard's Hot 100 at No. 53, made it to No. 1 after selling 273,000 downloads this week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The jump was the biggest ever for an act's first charting single. Break Your Heart also spent three weeks as the top U.K. song last fall.


VIDEO: Watch Cruz's 'Break Your Heart' on YouTube

"It's had the same sort of movement where you were not seeing anything of it and then it jumped straight in and started going crazy," says Cruz (whose name is pronouncedTie-oh Cruise).

Sean Ross, radio-info.com's executive editor of music and programming, calls the song "a great, obvious radio single, and one more example of U.K. artists lending themselves well to the new rhythmic pop — the place where dance, hip-hop and pop meet — because they've always done a more pop distillation of R&B."

Cruz already is a star in Europe, having released two hit albums (2008's Departure and 2009's Rokstarr) and written songs for Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Tinchy Stryder, Sugababes and others. He'd originally written Break Your Heart for Cole. The song, which warns a would-be lover not to fall for him, was just "an exaggeration of what I was feeling at the time."

"You write songs for different people and they don't always take them," Cruz says by phone from Los Angeles, where he's filming the video for next single Dirty Picture, featuring Ke$ha.

"Her record company just sat on it. We took it and I wrote some verses for it. We did a new version for the U.S., and called in (featured guest) Ludacris to do his thing."

Cruz, 26, says he expects Rokstarr to be released here in May. The U.K. version will be enhanced with some tracks from Departure and possibly a new track or two.

The London-based singer, son of a Nigerian father and Brazilian mother, owns the label Rokstarr Entertainment Division and plays piano, guitar, trombone, trumpet and drums. His music leans to electro-pop, infused with R&B, hip-hop and rock. The 2008 song She's Like a Star earned him a best U.K. male nomination for the British MOBO (Music of Black Origin) Awards.

Cruz just wrapped the first day of his video shoot — a series of club scenes — but he was looking forward to Day 2.

"We're going to get to drive a sports car in the desert," he says. "Now that's going to be fun."