“Sarah Smile” by Hall and Oates

"Sara Smile" is the ballad that finally got Hall & Oates through the door in America. It first surfaced in August 1975 as the second song on Daryl Hall & John Oates, their album for RCA, a hushed, silky slice of blue-eyed soul that both halves of the duo wrote together. It's about Daryl Hall's girlfriend at the time, the Sara of the title, and they stayed together for almost 30 years.

They played it on their autumn 1975 tour, where one reviewer tipped it to anyone who had fallen for "She's Gone", and late that year RCA readied it as a seven-inch, the album's third single. It crept onto the Hot 100 at 91 at the end of January 1976 and climbed to number four by late June: their first top 40 hit, their first top ten, their breakthrough.

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