In music industry parlance, a “sleeper hit” is a song that attracts little attention upon its release, but becomes a big success much later on.
Let’s define a “personal sleeper hit” as a song that you have long disliked or regarded as unremarkable (for years, at least) but eventually became a favourite of yours.
A couple of my own personal sleeper hits:
I first heard the Ohio Express tune “Yummy Yummy Yummy” back in 1992 or so, when I was first getting into Monty Python’s Flying Circus via the VHS releases. (The song is used in one of the sketches, where it’s performed by a set of inanimate packing crates in a Top of the Pops-style TV show.) I thought nothing of the song for thirty years, when it suddenly became an earworm for me. All last year I was signing it incessantly around the house.
I’ve had George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass for about twenty years now but I’ve never really liked any of the tracks besides “My Sweet Lord”. Today I suddenly had an inexplicable hankering for “Wah-Wah”. I have a feeling I’m going to have it on repeat for the next couple weeks.
What are your personal sleeper hits, and what made you finally warm to them?
“Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash never did much for me. Then, one day relatively recently, I heard it, really listened to it, and it struck me as to how every element of it is pretty much perfect.
“Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. Same effect.
I was aware of both of these when they were current and pretty much dismissed them as just “ok”.
GHOST LOVE SCORE by Nightwish with Tarja* on lead. Make no mistake, I fully recognized the level of talent and artistry displayed here the first time I heard it. Vocal gymnastics doesn’t automatically make art that speaks to me on first listen. I considered it overly long and a triumph of style over substance. Frankly, I thought it was boring.
It did grow on me though. I took the time to dig into the lyrics and found new appreciation for the piece. It’s never going to be my head-banging favorite but it definitely earned a place in my rotation.
*Don’t even start on Tarja vs Anette vs Floor. We like what we like and there’s no reason to go beyond that.
In my late teens to early 20s I owned a few Dylan albums. A lesser, or even least, favorite of those being ‘Blood on the Tracks’. It just didn’t do much for me.
Then my first real, serious girlfriend as a Freshman in college broke up with me. I started playing BOTT constantly. Every song on the album became my ‘personal sleeper hit’. Or as Bob says in 'Tangled Up In Blue":
And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burning coal Pouring off of every page Like it was written in my soul, from me to you
Almost everything by Yes that’s ended up earworming me has taken the personal-sleeper path. I’d hear the song once, twice, maybe skip past it on the CD some of the time, then the afternoon after hearing it the eighth or ninth time I’m playing it from memory in my head and can’t wait to get back to where I can play it again for real.
a) Your Move
b) And You and I
c) Turn of the Century
d) We Have Heaven / South Side of the Sky
d) Awaken
e) Close to the Edge
f) Mind Drive
… and a few others like that… initially just “meh one of their weird-sounding ones” or “meh kind of nothing-sounding” then the esoteric nature of it hooks me.
This is a hard question because it seems like this is what always happens to me. I rarely like anything right away, and then later on it’s, “whoa!”
But I heard a song today that made me think of this thread: Come Back and Stay, by Paul Young. When it was popular I just regarded it as background noise. Years later, it became one of my favorite songs.
Another one: What’s Up, by 4 Non Blondes. When it was popular I barely paid attention to it, regarded it as a bit annoying maybe. But it sounds great now.
For the longest time, I thought “What If We Give It Away?” was the lone black mark on R.E.M.'s excellent Lifes Rich Pageant. It just didn’t work for me, for whatever reason. And then, at some point, I decided to give it a second chance and discovered that, hey, it’s actually a pretty good song after all. I’m also starting to defrost a little bit when it comes to “Camera,” which is pretty much the only track on Reckoning that I don’t think is pretty cool.
I think I’ve mentioned this before in a thread, but I never got Dylan’s The Man In Me until I heard it in The Big Lebowski. Why? I have no idea.
The entire oeuvre of Black Grape (and to a lesser extent Happy Mondays) falls into this category. They were from the 1990s, and it feels like I’ve spent the last five years finally finding out about them and learning to love them. This is probably because I historically had a fairly stupid bias against dance music (which I’m working my way through, Doctor.)
An album I like better every time I hear it (having originally dismissed it as pretty much of no interest) is The Man Who Sold The World by Bowie - a lot of that I love now.
And if you want a genre, country music. No apologies.
I got the Harvey Danger album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? from Columbia House in 1998, because of the hit “Flagpole Sitta.” I don’t know if I even bothered to listen to the whole album when I got it (because of course I got 11 other albums that day!)
At some point it made it on to my computer when I ripped all of my CDs, and then one day a song from the album came across my playlist and I was like “What’s all this then?” I then listened to the whole album and then their other albums, and I REALLY liked them. They have a great sound!
This all happened in about 2010. I remember because I then Googled them only to find out they had JUST broken up and played their final show in 2009. C’est la vie.