"Closing Time"

Semisonic came out of Minneapolis in 1993, when Dan Wilson and John Munson, late of Trip Shakespeare, teamed up with drummer Jacob Slichter under the name Pleasure. Renamed by 1995, they signed to Elektra to make their first album, were dropped when the label's president quit mid-recording, and finished Great Divide for MCA in 1996.

The band had been ending every concert with "If I Run" and were sick of it, so Wilson set out to write a new set-closer. His girlfriend, Diane Espaldon, was pregnant at the time. "Part way into the writing of the song," he has said, "I realized it was also about being born" — Slichter describes it as being sent out of the womb "as if by a bouncer clearing out a bar." Produced by Nick Launay, it was released on February 23, 1998, as the lead single from Feeling Strangely Fine and hit mainstream radio that April.

It went to number one on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, reached number 11 on the airplay chart, and was nominated for Best Rock Song at the 1999 Grammys. Chris Applebaum's split-screen video has the band playing on the right while a woman closes up a café on the left; the two head for the same club, miss each other by seconds, and Wilson ends the clip with a shrug. Billboard called it an "instantly memorable rock ditty." Slichter has been blunt about how it got so big, saying in 2006 that it cost "something close to $700,000 to $800,000 to get 'Closing Time' on the air."

"Secret Smile" made the band British radio favorites in 1999, All About Chemistry followed in 2001, and then Semisonic went quiet for nineteen years before a 2020 EP and the 2023 album Little Bit of Sun. The song itself never closed. Alternative stations play it as their last record before flipping formats — Dallas's KDGE looped it for a day in November 2016 — and it re-entered the charts in 2011 after turning up in Friends with Benefits and The Office.