THROWING THE FLAG ON THE TERM ONE-HIT WONDER

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the term one-hit wonder. Sure, I get that the label has some justification, but why diminish the fact that a band or artist did what most musicians spend a lifetime chasing—they wrote a hit.

Sometimes when I see a band labeled a one-hit wonder, I want to throw a penalty flag, go under the hood for a replay, and start pulling out deep cuts that are just as good, if not better, than the song that got the radio and MTV love (and the big label push).

I don’t always have the patience to do the research just to validate my point, so I’m going off personal opinion here.

In 1998, Semisonic, a band from Minneapolis, burst onto the scene with “Closing Time.” The song was a smash, and the band is widely referred to as a one-hit wonder… mostly because many people never bothered to explore their other work. That’s a shame, because “Singing in My Sleep,” in my opinion, is just as good—and has just as much (if not more) substance than “Closing Time.”

1998 also gave us another artist people love to reduce to a single song: Sean Mullins, with the hit “Lullaby.”

Calling Sean Mullins a one-hit wonder really gets under my skin, because I can rattle off a handful of songs that prove there’s a lot more going on in his catalog than what you heard on the radio. If someone would scratch the surface and actually dive into the body of work, they’d find the depth that never gets mentioned when we’re busy stamping a label on a career.

A few songs I definitely recommend: “Shimmer,” “Twin Rocks, Oregon,” “Beautiful Wreck,” “And on a Rainy Night,” and “California.”

Another Minneapolis band formed in the late ’80s that people love to label a one-hit wonder is Soul Asylum. Really? Did we all just skip the first two tracks of their 1992 album Grave Dancers Union, the same album that gave us “Runaway Train”? “Somebody to Shove” and “Black Gold” hit just as hard and deserve the same respect.

And I once heard someone refer to Lisa Loeb as a one-hit wonder. I immediately came with the receipts, phone in hand, and “Do You Sleep?” ready to go… a song that cracked the Top 20.

So yeah, sometimes a hit is all you ever hear. But that doesn’t mean it’s all they ever made. And if this little rant does anything, I hope it’s this: the next time you hear someone call an artist a one-hit wonder, throw a flag, go under the hood, and give the album a fair replay.