“Abracadabra” by Steve Miller Band

"Abracadabra" was the title track and first single from the Steve Miller Band's 1982 album, and Steve Miller wrote it alone, sang it, played guitar and co-produced it with drummer Gary Mallaber. The spell behind it, so the story goes, was Diana Ross, whom Miller had met years before when both appeared on the same episode of the TV pop show Hullabaloo, and the lyric's spinning-wheel imagery nods to a segment of The Original Amateur Hour.

Byron Allred's synthesizers glint over Gerald Johnson's bass, Mallaber adds keyboards, and David Cole engineered and mixed. Capitol, by Miller's account, doubted it, yet it spent two nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and became the biggest hit of Miller's career so far, as well as the band's last US top 40 hit. In 2024 Eminem worked it into "Houdini".

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