Artist · chart history · #512 in indie & aaa artist polls
Built To Spill
Band Boise United States Formed 1992
Built To Spill formed in 1992 in Boise, United States. Built To Spill has 47 chart appearances on 34 radio countdowns from 11 stations on RockLists, spanning 1997–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Carry the Zero”, which appears on 6 lists with a best position of #41. The station that charted Built To Spill most often is KEXP (Seattle, WA), with 13 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2001.
Built To Spill came out of Boise, Idaho, in 1992, and from the start the band was really Doug Martsch plus whoever he needed that year. The singer and guitarist wanted a rotating cast, a fresh set of players behind him on every record, and the early lineups did turn over fast. Then the plan quietly stalled: Brett Nelson and Scott Plouf settled in, Jim Roth joined in 1999, and the band held steady for more than a decade before Martsch went back to shuffling the deck in 2012.
What never changed was the sound: Martsch's reedy, earnest voice floating over guitars that sprawl, tangle and chime like three conversations at once. There's Nothing Wrong With Love, in 1994, gave indie kids the gawky pop of "Car" and "In The Morning". Perfect From Now On, in 1996, stretched out into long, knotted epics like "Randy Described Eternity". Keep It Like a Secret tightened the screws in 1998 with "Carry the Zero" and "The Plan", and it was their first album to crack the Billboard 200.
Critics have stayed on their side the whole way, and those three '90s records still turn up on a best-albums-of-the-decade list. Ancient Melodies of the Future and You in Reverse, home of the winding "Goin' Against Your Mind", carried the guitars into the new century, and There Is No Enemy, in 2009, climbed higher on the charts than anything they'd done before.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Built To Spill on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Carry the Zero | 6 | #41 | – | – | |
| 2 | Goin' Against Your Mind | 9 | #70 | – | – | |
| 3 | Car | 5 | #254 | – | – | |
| 4 | Hindsight | 2 | #71 | – | 2009 | |
| 5 | Strange | 3 | #58 | – | 2001 | |
| 6 | The Plan | 2 | #85 | – | – | |
| 7 | You Were Right | 7 | #1685 | – | – | |
| 8 | Randy Described Eternity | 1 | #118 | – | – | |
| 9 | Life's A Dream | 1 | #21 | – | 2010 | |
| 10 | Center of the Universe | 2 | #88 | – | 1999 | |
| 11 | Untrustable | 2 | #83 | – | 1997 | |
| 12 | In The Morning | 1 | #305 | – | – | |
| 13 | Twin Falls | 1 | #361 | – | – | |
| 14 | Kicked it in the Sun | 1 | #484 | – | – | |
| 15 | I Would Hurt A Fly | 1 | #697 | – | – | |
| 16 | Living Zoo | 1 | #99 | – | 2015 | |
| 17 | Big Dipper | 1 | #530 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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