“Santa Monica” by Everclear

"Santa Monica" is the song that blew the doors open for Everclear, a cut from their second album Sparkle and Fade in 1995 that Art Alexakis wrote on his own and sings like a man with one foot already out the door. It's post-grunge at its most tuneful, a bright, driving guitar charge with a chorus that sounds like a getaway plan. In Europe it carried a subtitle, "Watch the World Die".

Alexakis produced it himself, with Michael W. Douglass, who recorded it, and Brian Malouf, who mixed it, as co-producers.

It was sent to American rock radio in September 1995 without ever going on sale as a US single, and radio did the rest: it spent three weeks at number one on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart in 1996 and reached 29 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart. Overseas it went top 40 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, and it remains the band's highest-charting single in Australia.

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