“All the Small Things” by blink-182

"All the Small Things" was the second single from Enema of the State, blink-182's third studio album, sent out by MCA in September 1999, and it's the song that carried the band into the pop mainstream. Tom DeLonge wrote most of it, as a love song for his girlfriend, and he built it on purpose as a dead-simple, radio-ready tune, with the Ramones' straight-to-the-point minimalism as his model.

It's three chords of sunshine: DeLonge on guitar and lead vocals, Mark Hoppus on bass and backing vocals, Travis Barker's drums driving it all hard, and a wordless sing-along hook that sticks like gum on a sneaker. Jerry Finn produced, Tom Lord-Alge mixed, and Roger Joseph Manning Jr. added keyboards, all of it polished to a bright pop shine without losing the punk hustle.

Marcos Siega's video skewered boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and became an MTV fixture, which made the joke a little complicated once the band became just as big. The song reached number six on the Hot 100, topped Modern Rock Tracks and made number two in the UK, the band's best showing ever in America.

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