Sometimes you need someone fighting for you.
Semisonic found themselves in dire straits in 1997. Their debut album hadn’t sold. Their first three singles hadn’t hit. Their record company wanted a radio-friendly rock album for their sophomore effort and now their lead singer and songwriter, Dan Wilson, was listening to Cat Stevens and Simon & Garfunkel and working on a batch of quiet, acoustic songs.
The situation didn’t get any better after the band recorded their second album, Feeling Strangely Fine. After whittling down 60 possible songs to 20, they spent months recording those 20 at various studios around Minneapolis and then mixed what they considered the 12 best. Upon listening to the finished product, the label president for MCA Records uttered those classic record executive words, “I don’t hear a single.”
Semisonic already owed the label over a million dollars so they didn’t have a lot of leverage to dispute that claim. The immediate future looked bleak and their drummer was already considering the possibility of needing to find a day job.
Luckily, Nancy, the head of radio promotion for MCA, adamantly disagreed with her boss. She thought the opening track, “Closing Time,” was a sure-fire hit and had no problem going to the president and employing very strong language to convince him.
“Closing Time” originally came about because Dan Wilson’s bandmates kept complaining about playing the same song every night to close their shows, so he decided to write a new one which literally said “the concert’s over, now get out.” Although he used a bar analogy to hang the lyrics on, at some point Wilson realized he was also subconsciously writing about his wife’s pregnancy and the impending birth of their first child. It wasn’t only the audience who needed to head for the exit.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. It works on multiple levels! (Excepting the very specific alcohol references).
Anyway, once Nancy convinced MCA to relent and release “Closing Time” as a single, she immediately went to work on the program director for the top rock station in Los Angeles. He, too, surrendered in the face of her enthusiasm and cajoling, and the song built momentum from there, finally reaching #1 on the Alternative Rock chart in the summer of 1998.
So I hope you have found a friend… with Semisonic.
1 2 3 o' clock 4 o' clock Rock 
Houston, how did this debt occur? “Semisonic already owed the label over a million dollars” — do artists have to pay for their own (whatever record companies do)?
Artists, especially when they’re young and have no leverage to sign a favorable contract, have to pay a surprising amount of their own costs. The record company fronts them the money for the recording studio and promotion and various other costs (like every reel of tape back when they recorded on tape), and then recoups that money from future sales. If there are no sales, the artist can end up owing a lot of money. So when “Closing Time” hit, the band wouldn’t have seen any profit for themselves until they’d paid off all the debt from the first album and whatever debt they had accrued from the second.
Well that’s just plain old wrong.
Agreed 😂
It didn’t happen in every case. Some artists (or their managers) were shrewder. And often the record companies would use the money they made from big acts to subsidize smaller acts. Warner Bros in particular was very good about this back in the day.