Goo Goo Dolls — "Slide"

"Slide" arrived on September 17, 1998, as the lead single from Dizzy Up the Girl — the Goo Goo Dolls album that turned a Buffalo bar band's slow climb into total radio ownership. Written solely by John Rzeznik and produced with Rob Cavallo, it hit number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and pulled off something rarer: reaching number one on four separate airplay charts — Adult Top 40, Mainstream Top 40, Alternative, and Adult Alternative — making it inescapable across every format. Billboard ranked it among the most successful songs of 1999, and it eventually went triple platinum.

The secret hiding in the jangle: Rzeznik explained on VH1 Storytellers that the song is about "these two teenage kids, and the girlfriend gets pregnant, and they're trying to decide whether she should get an abortion, or they should get married" — a story of young people boxed in by a strict, religious community, compressed into the breeziest chorus of the year. That contrast between bright sound and heavy subject was becoming the era's signature move (Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" pulled the same trick), and "Slide" is one of its cleanest examples: pure car-radio joy with a knot in its stomach, still instantly transporting anyone who had a radio in the winter of 1998–99.