“Shining Star” by Earth, Wind & Fire

"Shining Star" was born under a real night sky: Maurice White was out on a night walk while Earth, Wind & Fire were cutting That's the Way of the World at Caribou Ranch, looked up at the stars and took the idea back to the band. He wrote it with Larry Dunn and Philip Bailey and produced it himself, and Columbia put it out as a single in January 1975.

It went all the way to No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the soul chart, a first for the band on both counts and their only Hot 100 chart-topper ever, and it went gold. AllMusic's Alex Henderson heard sweaty funk; Rolling Stone's Gordon Fletcher said it glowed with the incendiary charge that once led Sandy Pearlman to call the band "the closest thing to a black heavy-metal band".

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