“One Headlight” by The Wallflowers

"One Headlight" throws open the Wallflowers' second album, Bringing Down the Horse (1996), and it's the song that turned Jakob Dylan's band into a fixture on rock radio. Dylan wrote it alone, and T Bone Burnett produced it with a warm, lived-in feel that sounds like it's been playing on a jukebox for years.

The band stacks it beautifully: three guitars between Dylan, Jon Brion and Michael Ward, Leo LeBlanc's resonator guitar twanging at the margins, Rami Jaffee's Hammond organ swelling underneath along with some upright piano, and Greg Richling's bass and Matt Chamberlain's drums and shakers rolling steady as a highway. Gary Louris and Sam Phillips add harmonies behind Dylan's weary, sandpaper lead, and Tom Lord-Alge mixed it.

Sent to radio as the album's second single, it became the first song ever to top all three of Billboard's rock airplay charts: Modern Rock Tracks, Mainstream Rock and Triple-A. Canada kept it at number one for five weeks. Rolling Stone and MTV ranked it 58th among the 100 greatest pop songs in 2000, and Billboard named it the greatest adult alternative song of all in 2021.

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