“Closing Time” by Semisonic

"Closing Time" was the lead single from Feeling Strangely Fine, Semisonic's second album, in 1998, and it hit mainstream radio that April 27. Dan Wilson wrote it, sang lead and played guitar and piano; John Munson played bass and Jacob Slichter drums, both adding vocals, while Nick Launay produced and recorded it and Jack Joseph Puig mixed it.

On the surface it's the last-call song to end all last-call songs, a farewell to the bar as the night winds down and everyone gets shown the door. Wilson's piano keeps it chiming, a string section of Bruce Allard, Mary Bahr, Carolyn Boulay, Troy Gardner and Josh Koestenbaum swells underneath, and the melody is so sturdy it could hold up the bar. But Slichter has let on that Wilson wrote it while waiting to become a father, and that it's really about a baby being pushed out of the womb the way a bouncer empties a room.

It went to number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, made the top 50 in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song in 1999. It came back in 2011 after turning up in the film Friends with Benefits and in "Doomsday", an episode of The Office, and charted again in three countries, peaking higher than ever in Australia and Ireland.

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