Don’t forget “Hyperactive!”
Well, I can see why. :eek:
Outside of Stacy’s Mom, Fountains of Wayne put out several albums worth of fine power pop with some beautiful ballads sprinkled in for good measure.
You also mentioned them as a “band that should have stayed around longer” in another thread. I fully agree, except that I don’t know whether they’re really one-hit wonders: I somehow knew of them and had their first two albums before “Stacy’s Mom” came out. But yes, it’s the one song that a lot of people know them by.
I’m going to include Joshua Kadison even though his first album had several hits (“Jessie”, “Beautiful in My Eyes”, “Picture Postcards From L.A.”). His follow-up album was a huge departure from the Top-40 love songs of his debut album; full of stories of prostitutes, drag queens, Mexican folklore, and lost love, Delilah Blue did poorly enough for his label to drop him. But the songs are fantastic. And not only that, after his label dropped him he decided to keep making music and offer it for free on his website. He moved to a remote island and lives a pretty reclusive lifestyle now, supported by royalties from his hits.
…Groucho Marx paraphrase in one, two, three…
Yeah, I guess we have to define exactly what “one hit wonder” means in this thread. I’d wager that if asked to name a Grateful Dead song, most non-Deadheads would say “Truckin” rather than “Touch of Grey”.
They also had a hit with Talk To Ya Later. And Fee Waybill was one of the big three people in the future, along with Clarence Clemons and Martha Davis in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I’m probably the only one who can say this: I own one song by Crash Test Dummies, and it’s not “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”.
They were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live years ago and played two songs, the famous one, and another one called, “Afternoons and Coffee Spoons.” I liked that one a lot, so much that I bought it from Amazon Music. Give a listen, very different from the one that got all the airplay.
I am actually a big fan of Tiny Tim. He was a genuine music scholar and had an encyclopedic knowledge of Tin Pan Alley era music. He was most famous for his falsetto Tiptoe Thru the Tulips, but he also possessed a deep, resonant baritone. Once you get past the gimmick, he’s actually quite entertaining on more than a kitsch level. All his albums are available on Youtube.
Cowboy Mouth. The greatest live band you’ve never seen.
Hit #26 with ‘Jenny Says’ in 1998 or so and faded. But their entire body of work is astonishing to listen to. It’s all heart and passion.
Harry Chapin (Cat’s in the Cradle) had a successful career writing songs that were mostly too long to play on the radio.
Nitpick - his follow-up to Golden Age of Wireless was The Flat Earth (also an excellent album) but yeah, “Science!” is pretty much the only song that anyone remembers.
That is always my first thought when it comes to threads like these.
For the US market:
Dexys Midnight Runners (their three 80s albums were all great)
Breeders (“Cannonball” off their second album Last Splash is what made them known, but their debut Pod is the album everybody I knew listened to.)
Madness. As far as I can tell, “Our House” is the only one of their songs to be a hit in the US, but they have so many great two-tone ska songs: “House of Fun,” “Baggy Trousers,” “It Must Be Love,” etc…
Yes, but they are/were big in their native England. I wondered whether bands like that count for the purposes of this thread.
I wonder, too, but that’s also why I specifically said “for the US market,” because many of these will be market-specific.
Wow, forgot all about them. I saw them live, at the Paradise in Boston, and chatted with the guy, whatever his name was. He was just a little feller.
I guess if a band is a one hit wonder where you are, it’s fine. So if an American says Madness it counts, but it would be a cheat if you’re English.
Lots of bands that were HUGE in the UK in the 70s and 80s only had 1 hit here in the US
The Boomtown Rats
Adam and the Ants
And worst of all The Clash only had one top ten hit here. . .WTF?
mc
(all songs cited never made the charts!)