Monday, April 18, 2011

One-Hit Wonders

A one-hit wonder is a recording artist that has one major hit and then never achieves that level of success again. The exact criteria vary from one definition to another, from placing the song anywhere on Billboard's Hot 100 to maintaining that only #1 songs qualify.

While looking at a lot of lists of one-hit wonders and the songs that made them famous, I came up with a list of my favorites. I had doubts that some of the ones I saw really only had one hit, but I wrote them down anyway. Then I chose ten to mention here.

Here are some of my favorite hit songs by one-hit wonders, in no particular order:

1. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (The Verve) - A phenomenal song, and a great video to go with it.

2. "Under the Milky Way" (The Church) - It's hard to get better than this song, which was later included in the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

3. "I'll See You in My Dreams" (Giant) - One of only two power ballads included on this list, although there are probably others I could have mentioned.

4. "Bad Day" (Daniel Powter) - A catchy song with a good video.

5. "Don't Close Your Eyes" (Kix) - The second power ballad I decided to include here.

6. "Tainted Love" (Soft Cell) - This one will always remind me of Port Charles, which made good use of the song during its "Tainted Love" arc.

7. "The Promise" (When In Rome) - This is a nice, catchy song.

8. "Cry Little Sister" (Gerard McMann) - This theme from The Lost Boys has been covered by several bands and re-recorded by the original artist, but the original version is my favorite.

9. "Cry" (Godley & Creme) - Somehow, I completely missed this one until seeing the video a few years ago. Priceless.

10. "Major Tom (Coming Home)" (Peter Schilling) - This follow-up to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" tells what happened to Major Tom.

4 comments:

Tracy Moore said...

Neat post! Some of my favorite songs to date have been one hit wonders. Being a teenager in the 80's explains a lot huh? :)

Luana Krause said...

Jam Up and Jellie Tight comes to mind. LOL.

Karen M. Peterson said...

I agree that it's surprising some of these artists were one-hit wonders. Makes you wonder what the rest of their music sounded like.

Marie Anne said...

Many that I'm not familiar with, but 'Don't Close Your Eyes' was a good one.