“Swingtown” by Steve Miller Band

"Swingtown" was the third and last single Steve Miller Band pulled from Book of Dreams in 1977, and it wound up the album's second-biggest hit. Miller wrote it with Chris McCarty and produced it himself, with Mike Fusaro engineering and Jim Gaines mixing. Cashbox traced its pull to a drum-and-bass riff you can't shake, and Record World ranked the tune with the most compelling melodies Miller had come up with.

It climbed to number 17 on the Hot 100 and 13 in Canada, and it kept working long after. Ford cut up its instrumental stretches for TV spots selling the 1979 Mustang, it later turned up in My Girl 2 and an episode of The Sopranos, and students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison sing it at football games in Camp Randall Stadium.

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