The Guest by Phantom Planet

The Guest, Phantom Planet's second album, landed on Epic in February 2002, a bright, chiming slab of Los Angeles pop rock cut while founding drummer Jason Schwartzman was still behind the kit, a year before he left the band. Its working title was Phantom Planet Was Here.

The record's calling card is "California", a wide-eyed, windows-down singalong that the video had already put on MTV2 by mid-2002, and that turned into the band's breakthrough once Fox made it the theme for The O.C. in August 2003. "Lonely Day" found a second life of its own on the Smallville and Laguna Beach soundtracks. That November, Epic put the album back out with four bonus tracks, videos, photos and the lyrics scanned straight from the notebook the songs were first written in. And the guy sprinting across the cover photo? Australian musician Ben Lee.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.