14 items
Wes Scantlin, alone in a Hollywood Boulevard hotel room and missing his son, reworked an old Kansas City song into "Blurry." Fred Durst's label had signed him and replaced his entire band; the result was 2002's biggest rock song in America, number five on the Hot 100, with a video of Wes watching his boy get driven away.
Dan Wilson wrote "Closing Time" so Semisonic would have something new to end their shows with, and realized partway through that it was also about the baby his girlfriend was carrying. It topped the modern rock chart in 1998, earned a Grammy nomination, and became the song radio stations play right before they change formats.
The Georgia band that went from a basement demo to "Shine," eight weeks at No. 1 on rock radio in 1994. Ed Roland sang its "yeah" into an empty toilet-paper tube, and the "heaven" in its chorus got them mistaken for a Christian band. "December," "The World I Know" and "Heavy" kept them on rock radio for the rest of the decade.
The arena-rock anthem that felt both deeply sincere and faintly ridiculous, and proved Creed were simultaneously the most mocked and most inescapable band in America. Scott Stapp's arms-wide-open delivery of lyrics about lucid dreaming somehow dominated rock radio for over a year.
The muted-strum guitar riff and the growled chorus that owned rock radio in the winter of 1995–96: a college band from Williamsburg, Virginia, named after a CHiPs call sign, with a song about a relationship gone heavy. It hit number one on Billboard's Album Rock chart and number 39 on the Hot 100, carried American Standard to platinum, and then, by the drummer's own account, became "a blessing and a curse."
The slow-burn Seattle ballad that hit number 18 on the Hot 100 in 1994, and a song Kevin Martin wrote for Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, dead of a heroin overdose in 1990, years before most of the country heard it.
"I'm not sick but I'm not well": a college-newspaper band's answer to the Seattle scene, from a group weighing whether to quit when one DJ started playing it. Rolling Stone later called it the best song of 1998.
![Video thumbnail — Nickelback - How You Remind Me [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Aiay8I5IPB8/maxresdefault.jpg)
The opening growl — 'Never made it as a wise man' — that became the sound of 2001, and the song that proved Nickelback were simultaneously the internet's favorite punching bag and the actual soundtrack to the decade. Mathematically the most-played song of the 2000s on US radio, and everyone hated it, and everyone still knows every word.
The post-grunge confession that owned rock radio in 2001: Aaron Lewis's slow-burning inventory of a wasted year, a then-record sixteen weeks atop the Modern Rock chart, and a Fred Durst-directed video that ends with a dropped cigarette burning the apartment down. It carried Staind from Springfield, Massachusetts clubs to a number-one album.
At fifteen, Brad Arnold of 3 Doors Down wrote "Kryptonite" during math class — and ended up with one of the inescapable rock songs of the decade. From a Mississippi radio station's runaway request line to an eight-times-platinum single, this was the sound of the year 2000 on every rock station in America. You probably knew every word before you fully understood them.
![Video thumbnail — Matchbox Twenty - 3AM (Official Video) [HD Remaster]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/C-Naa1HXeDQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Orlando band behind "Push," "3AM," and "Real World," whose slow-building debut album was eventually certified diamond. Singer Rob Thomas then co-wrote and sang Santana's "Smooth," and the band's third album kept them on the radio into 2003.
The slow, drawled, two-minute-fifty-two-second oddity about "disco lemonade" and "platform double-suede" that held number one on Billboard's Modern Rock chart for a then-record 15 weeks. It was Marcy Playground's only hit, and plenty of people mistake it for Nirvana.
Three guys from Norwood, Ontario whose demo of "I Hate Everything About You" got them a Jive deal and then never left rock radio: 45 weeks on the Modern Rock chart, nine-times platinum, a billion Spotify streams. Three Days Grace turned Adam Gontier's rehab notebooks into One-X and became the angst band of every mid-2000s locker.
The ballad that would not leave the radio in 2001 and 2002: 23 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Top 40, a No. 5 peak on the Hot 100, and a video set in the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. Aaron Kamin wrote it after a funeral, and a Disney film-music executive heard a monster.