Desperate for changing, starving for truth/I’m closer to where I started, I’m chasing after you.
One thing to know about the way I consume music is that, by and large, I do not care about the charts. While knowing what songs have gone to number 1 over the years makes for fun trivia, it has little to no bearing on what music I love or find value in. But for one summer when I was 11 years old, I became obsessed with chart-watching, and this song was the reason why.
It’s been long enough since the summer of 2001 that I don’t really recall what initially inspired me to turn on the clock radio in my bedroom on some stray Sunday morning and tune in to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 countdown. As far as I can remember, that show kicked off at 8 in the morning and ran until lunchtime. It was not, in other words, the kind of thing you’d expect a preteen boy to find himself enmeshed in during the summertime, when more interesting engagements like sleeping in or playing video games were options. Plus, AT40 was loaded with commercial breaks and packed with songs that I, as someone who did not have much of a taste for the R&B-flavored pop that was dominant at the turn of the century, actively disliked. Why did I subject myself to four hours of this nonsense when I could have been doing literally anything else?
It’s probably impossible to fathom now that everyone has Spotify, or YouTube, or any number of other ways to access the song they want to hear at the moment they want to hear it. But once upon a time, if you were a kid with no money and no CD player – let alone a streaming service or an iPod – the only way to hear the songs you loved was to listen the radio until the DJ got around to playing them. And at least with AT40, when the song you loved was a current hot pop hit, you were guaranteed to hear that song at some point on Sunday morning.
And so, Sunday after Sunday that summer, I dutifully posted up in front of my radio and listened to American Top 40 from beginning to end, waiting for the moment that I’d hear that rich, sonorous slide guitar that kicks off Lifehouse’s breakthrough single “Hanging by a Moment.” I adored this song from the first time I heard it, especially that megawatt chorus hook and the way it soars toward the heavens: “I’m falling even more in love with you/Letting go of all I’ve held on to/I’m standing here until you make me move/I’m hanging by a moment here with you.”
One of the ways I’d make the countdown fun for myself was by keeping a written tally of where songs charted each week. It built anticipation to see how different songs moved up or down the chart from week to week, especially since “Hanging by a Moment” was consistently hanging around near the top of the rankings. Each week, I tuned in with the same question on my mind: Would this be the week that my favorite song of the moment ascended to its rightful place at number 1?
That week never came. “Hanging by a Moment” peaked at number 2 in mid-June, denied the top spot by five-week chart-topper – and, that summer, my default “least favorite song” – “Lady Marmalade,” the Labelle cover from the Moulin Rouge! Soundtrack that featured Christina Aguilera, Lil Kim, Mya, and Pink. “Lady Marmalade” was usurped in July by Usher’s “U Remind Me,” which passed the baton to Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious,” which was soon knocked off the mountain by Alicia Keys’ “Fallin’.” “Hanging by a Moment” hung around for a long time, but it never got its moment.
I fell out of the habit of listening to the countdown once school resumed in the fall, and “Hanging by a Moment” fell out of heavy radio rotation soon after that. At the time, I found the fate of the song disheartening. Here was what I believed to be a perfect pop-rock song, and it had been repeatedly denied from chart glory by what my 10-year-old ears perceived to be significantly weaker tunes. Why hadn’t “Hanging by a Moment” gone all the way when it clearly had the juice to stick around as a major hit for months and months? It was my first conscious encounter with a music industry truth I’ve long since come to terms with: the songs you love the most are not necessarily going to be the biggest songs in the world. In fact, usually, they won’t be.
Funnily enough, “Hanging by a Moment” did get its due at the top of the charts, but not in the way I expected. Despite never topping the charts, Lifehouse’s big debut hit hung around for so long – 54 weeks on the charts, to be exact – that it became Billboard’s number 1 song of 2001 anyway. It was only the third song ever to top the year-end chart without going to number 1 on the weekly Hot 100; the first two were “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, in 1965; and “Breathe” by Faith Hill, in 1999. Only one song has accomplished the feat since: “Levitating” by Dua Lipa in 2021, 20 years after “Hanging by a Moment.” It’s a bizarre accolade, and like most other chart factoids, it only really matters as a point of trivia.
Still, I’ve always kind of loved that the one time I ever got really invested in the chart journey of a song, it was a track with one of the most wildly anomalous success stories in Billboard history. Maybe I willed “Hanging by a Moment” to its ultimate triumph with all the energy I expended on chart-watching that summer. Or maybe “Hanging by a Moment” was simply a great song that ran a slow-and-steady race to victory by being way more replayable than everything that was beating it to number 1 all summer.
For a long time, Lifehouse and the bands of their ilk – slickly-produced turn-of-the-century radio-rock acts – did not get a lot of respect. Billboard termed this mini-genre “Minivan Rock” in 2020, defining it as “the Y2K-straddling equivalent to the smooth soft rock that was similarly ubiquitous on radio playlists of the mid-1970s to early ’80s — what’s since come to be known as Yacht Rock.” While Minivan Rock wasn’t the most critically-revered micro-genre of the time, or even the most commercially successful, the artists that slot into it – Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, Fastball, Five for Fighting, The Calling, John Mayer, Vertical Horizon, Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and many more – were absolutely at the foundation of my music taste.
Here’s the fun part: When Billboard ranked the top 50 Minivan Rock songs as part of that 2020 feature, “Hanging by the Moment” once again took its rightful spot at the top of the mountain. “A perfect minivan rock song,” wrote Jason Lipshutz, Billboard’s executive director of music, in the accompanying blurb. “Lifehouse encapsulated the sound of turn-of-the-century alternative with a song that frontman Jason Wade wrote in a matter of minutes, the combination of his husky post-grunge voice, an instantly memorable slide guitar riff, and a chorus flush with dizzy emotion soundtracking only the best family outings.”
This song probably was the soundtrack to a lot of my family’s outings back in the day, but more than that, it was the soundtrack of my summer in 2001 – the first time I’d ever had a song thoroughly define a summer in the way that songs are supposed to be. I’m sure it will not shock you to hear that it wasn’t the last.