Len — "Steal My Sunshine"
The wobbly-sweet Canadian brother-sister one-hit wonder: a hungover-sounding boy-girl trade-off over a looping disco sample, sun-bleached and effortless. If 1999 had an official lazy-summer-afternoon soundtrack, this was it.
Len was a Toronto band built around siblings Marc and Sharon Costanzo — who, in true sibling fashion, hadn't spoken for months when Marc wrote the song. After a night at a rave, he looped the bridge of Andrea True Connection's 1976 disco hit "More, More, More" (earning its late writer Gregg Diamond a posthumous credit) and, as Sharon told it, "just dragged me out of bed and into the studio one morning" — which is exactly how her famously loose, just-woke-up vocal sounds. The song first surfaced on the soundtrack of the movie Go in March 1999, started pulling radio play on its own, and got a proper single release that June ahead of the album You Can't Stop the Bum Rush.
It reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 (and number three in their native Canada), went platinum in the US, UK, and Australia, and came wrapped in a video of the band goofing around on scooters, go-karts, and jet skis — a hangout captured on film, which is what the song is. America never heard from Len again, filing "Steal My Sunshine" alongside that summer's other gloriously disposable one-off hits, where it has aged into one of the most beloved of them all.
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