The song became the first of Phil Collins’ seven solo #1 hits in the United States, all of them in the 1980s. During the same period, of course, he was still scoring hits with Genesis, eventually even reaching #1 with “Invisible Touch” in 1986. That almost uninterrupted presence on the charts later brought fatigue and a certain backlash, especially in the 1990s, when a number of critics began attacking him as a symbol of a formulaic, easy pop sentimentality. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2010, Collins admitted that this criticism hurt him deeply and said it even contributed to suicidal thoughts. In that same piece, he stressed that he was not the one playing his songs over and over again. He was simply making the music. A few months later he announced his retirement, saying he was stopping so he could be present every day as a father to his two young sons. That information is not only about his public image. It also shows how heavily he felt the distance between what he had written out of real pain and what others later wanted to turn into caricature.