Where Are They Now? One-Hit Wonders

A NOTE ON THIS BOOK.

This is a book of biography, told with affection and built entirely from the public record. Every person in it gave the world a song that refused to leave. What we do here is follow those songs past the moment we all remember, into the lives that kept going after the charts moved on. Some of these stories are triumphant. A few are hard. Where the record turns painful, we slow down and tell it gently, because the people in these pages are not punchlines. They are artists who handed us something we still hum, and they deserve to be met with respect. Nothing here is invented. Where a life ended, we mark it with care.

There is a particular kind of fame that lasts about four minutes and then lasts forever.

You already know the feeling, because it has happened to you in a parking lot. A song slides out of a speaker, and before the singer has finished the first line, you are no longer standing where your body is standing. You are inside a car you sold years ago. You are at a school dance, in shoes that hurt. You are deep in a summer that smelled like chlorine and cut grass and somebody's borrowed cologne. Every word is right there, perfect, waiting. And yet the one thing that has vanished, completely, is the name of the human being doing the singing. They were everywhere once, for one blazing season, and then they were gone, and the song stayed behind like a coat somebody left at a party and never came back for.

We call these people one-hit wonders, and we say it with a small, fond cruelty, as though one flawless song were somehow a failure. It is one of the strangest insults in the whole of music. Most artists who ever picked up a guitar in a cold garage would hand over their entire catalog, gladly, for four minutes that the whole world agreed to memorize. To write something a total stranger will sing in the shower thirty years on, in a country you have never set foot in, in a language you may not even speak, is not a small accident. It is closer to a miracle than to a mistake.

This book is about the people standing on the far side of those songs. Not the song. The person. The voice you can summon in a heartbeat but could not pick out of a grocery line. We are going to ask the one question the radio never bothers to answer, the question that has been quietly tugging at your sleeve for years. Whatever happened to them?

The answers are going to surprise you, repeatedly. Some of these artists never left at all, and are out on the road this very year, singing the identical chorus to the grandchildren of the people who first loved it. Some looked at fame, decided it was a lousy trade, and walked off to find a quieter life, and found exactly that. A handful pulled off something far stranger and more wonderful than a second hit. They vanished from in front of the curtain and reappeared behind it, writing and producing the colossal songs you always assumed belonged to somebody far more famous, hiding in plain sight at the very summit of the business that supposedly chewed them up and spat them out. And some, we have lost. We will say their names with the tenderness the moment asks for, and then we will step back and let the music have the last word.

What ties all of them together is not failure. It is a single, blazing instant of being exactly right, of catching something that was hanging in the air, that everybody could feel and nobody had yet named, and bottling it before it could float away. That instant does not come back when you call for it. Most of these people understand that better than anyone alive, and they have made a kind of peace with it that the rest of us could stand to learn from.

So set the needle down in the groove. Let us go find out where they went.