"1985" by Bowling for Soup

SR-71 frontman Mitch Allan wrote "1985" with the band's drummer John Allen for their third and final album, Here We Go Again, in 2004 — where it sat as an album track, never released as a single. Bowling for Soup's Jaret Reddick heard the bones of a hit and rebuilt it to fit his band: he said it needed "a different bridge" and "more of a catchy intro," and the retooled, punked-up version arrived as a single on July 26, 2004, landing on A Hangover You Don't Deserve.

The cover climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went double Platinum in the US — Bowling for Soup's biggest American hit. The premise is surgical: Debbie, a suburban mom with two kids and an SUV, wakes up to realize her life stalled somewhere around 1985 — "Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana," as the chorus has it — a headful of MTV-era dreams that never happened. In the music video, Debbie (played by Joey House) tends her suburban lawn while the band, playing in a garage across the street, parodies iconic '80s music videos — Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love," George Michael's "Faith," Run-DMC, Mötley Crüe. Mitch Allan cameos to close the circle, and at the end Debbie crosses the street, lets her hair down, and — in a nod to Whitesnake — writhes on a Jaguar before joining the band.

The song's meta-trap is perfect: a pop-punk band gently mocking someone for romanticizing a bygone decade, in a song that every passing year turns into exactly that for millennials. It's nostalgia about nostalgia — the track meant to tease the impulse became the impulse, a time capsule of 2004 that plays like a warning label nobody read.