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My Life In 35 Songs, Track 2: “Hanging By A Moment” by Lifehouse

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Apr 1, 2025.

  1. Melody Bot Apr 1, 2025
    Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    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.

    Past Installments:

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  2. Former Planets Apr 1, 2025
    Former Planets

    Aaaachem!

    This is a great April fool's bit
     
  3. cricketandclover Apr 1, 2025
    (Last edited: Apr 1, 2025)
    cricketandclover

    Things have changed.

    Another awesome one, Craig. My friend Joe had the Wallflowers CD in middle school, and we'd listen to it all the time at his house. I got the sense his home life wasn't the best, and I wonder where he and his siblings ended up. Makes me sad when I think about him now and how we lost touch. And I remember this Lifehouse song and video being everywhere that summer, on the radio and VH1 – I was definitely more of a VH1 guy because they played more Minivan Rock.

    I get the feeling we'd have been best friends if we lived near each other. Helpless nostalgics for these moments and memories and all they represented in our growing lives.
     
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  4. Pepetito Apr 1, 2025
    Pepetito

    Trusted Supporter

    Great song.
     
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  6. zeketheplmbr Apr 1, 2025
    zeketheplmbr

    ... Supporter

    We need a repress of No Name Face! Where's the 25th anniversary love?

    I hadn't heard the term mini-van rock until now. haha. I love it.
     
    slickdtc and Craig Manning like this.
  7. simplejack Apr 1, 2025
    simplejack

    Still Alive

    Amazing second chapter. I loved the track back in the day. Everything was also another track I jammed from that record.

    And damn, I love minivan rock. Those turn of the century pop rock gems shaped a great part of my music taste.
     
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  8. Craig Manning Apr 1, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    One of the cool things about sites like AbsolutePunk/Chorus.fm is that they allowed us music obsessives and "helpless nostalgics" a chance to find each other! I was definitely the person at my school who cared most about music growing up, and I was bummed not to find more classmates who shared that passion. There were a few of us, though, and some of the kids I can remember swapping CDs with definitely fit into a similar box in my mind to what you're talking about with your old pal Joe: kids I lost touch with, but shared something really cool with for a short period of time.

    No Name Face seems like a shoe-in for a repress one of these days. Maybe an RSD release. I saw a bootleg of it recently, but official copies have been out of print for awhile.

    I really do recommend reading the Minivan Rock list on Billboard. A really fun trip down memory lane, with some really genuine outpourings of love for songs/artists that do not tend to end up on lists or get the retrospective/anniversary write-up treatment.

    Yeah, "Everything" is a great song, too. That song has a really, really effective and patient buildup, and when it finally gets loud and emotional, it's a great payoff. These guys were underrated songwriters.
     
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  9. Patterns in Traffic Apr 1, 2025
    Patterns in Traffic

    patternsintraffic.bandcamp.com Supporter

    This is one of the first CDs I owned and explored beyond the radio singles. It also became one of a few albums from that period that I deemed uncool once I got into heavier rock and pop punk. I remember it being relegated to my bedroom closet rather than being displayed on my CD rack along with the esteemed likes of Weezer, Linkin Park, Incubus, NFG, and probably, like, Disturbed and Adema.

    I revisited all of those albums that were banished to the closet years later, and almost all of them hold up extremely well. That kind of music feels timeless because the songs are built around these great, evergreen melodies.

    Long live Minivan Rock, I guess :-)
     
    Toner, SuNDaYSTaR, Craig Manning and 1 other person like this.
  10. Craig Manning Apr 1, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    I am very familiar exiling albums to the closet, haha. In fact, next week's feature is about a band that I long exiled to the proverbial closet of my musical development.

    Lifehouse never got fully exiled for me, but they were never "favorite band" status either. Part of the reason is that I don't think the follow-up to No Name Face is very good. They bounced back on their third and fourth records, for me.

    But yes, long live Minivan Rock indeed. I find it's weirdly the sound I miss most from the modern music context, because no one really tries to make music that sounds like it anymore. Those artists weren't cool enough to be influential, so that slickly-produced, extremely melodic brand of soft rock mostly faded away. I'd love for someone to bring it back. The closest anyone has come in the past few years is Patrick Droney, I think.

    I feel fortunate to have a few friends who work in music (mostly mixing and engineering) so we always nerd out about records, new and old, when we hang out. But totally, there are friends from my teenage years especially who I miss that connection with. One of the problems, I think, is that most people stop following new music as they get older, so a bunch of those friends, even the ones I did stay in touch with, aren't super into trading recommendations anymore.

    Thanks for reading! This has been so fun to do so far. Not just these two that are posted, but the other 17 or 18 I've got written and ready to go.
     
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  11. Braydizz Apr 1, 2025
    Braydizz

    https://www.discogs.com/user/Braydizz/collection

    It’s funny—we’re on opposite sides of the world, but we had eerily similar experiences with the same music, and it still shapes our tastes today.
     
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  12. Patterns in Traffic Apr 1, 2025
    Patterns in Traffic

    patternsintraffic.bandcamp.com Supporter

    Some of those CDs that sat in my closet for years have become my favorite albums that have the warmest nostalgic feelings attached.

    As much as I love No Name Face, I've never tried too hard to get into any of Lifehouse's other records. I remember the singles from Stanley Climbfall, but I never bought the CD and Lifehouse pretty much became a singles band for me from then on.

    Sounds like I'll have to listen to some more Patrick Droney!
     
    Craig Manning likes this.
  13. AlwaysEvolving21 Apr 1, 2025
    AlwaysEvolving21

    Trusted Supporter

    Craig, I swear you're at least 5 years older than you actually are given the first two tracks you've written about haha. I'm 38 and this was another major song of my early to mid-teen years.

    Again, fantastic song. Reminds me of my two very close friends who are twins. They LOVED this song. My earliest memory of this song was when their mom took us to the mall one day and they all blasted this song and sang every word with the windows down 3 times in a row lol.
     
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  15. balloon.pilot Apr 1, 2025
    balloon.pilot

    Regular

    Ya this song and album were life defining musical discoveries for me.
     
    Craig Manning likes this.
  16. Craig Manning Apr 1, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    None of their albums are front-to-back great, for me (No Name Face is definitely the closest) but their self-titled album and the one that came next, Who We Are, are pretty solid, with some great, great tracks. Totally more of a singles band than an album band, though.

    Droney's first album, State of the Heart, really is in the minivan rock pocket. He went a little more '80s on the follow-up, but so many of the songs on the debut feel like they could have been early 2000s hits.

    Haha, well, with "One Headlight," my older brother's music taste was definitely influential there, and he is five years older than me. This one I found on my own. But still, having older siblings probably got me into music earlier in life than I would have if I'd been the oldest/an only child.
     
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  17. cricketandclover Apr 1, 2025
    cricketandclover

    Things have changed.

    Going to check out the Droney album tonight.
     
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  18. Patterns in Traffic Apr 1, 2025
    Patterns in Traffic

    patternsintraffic.bandcamp.com Supporter

    I did give State of the Heart a handful of listens a while back and enjoyed it. Just haven't revisited it for one reason or another. I need to do that and get around to listening to the follow-up.
     
    Craig Manning likes this.
  19. Craig Manning Apr 1, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    One thing I really like about the second one is how nakedly nostalgic it is. When he released the album, he put out a trailer that linked every song to a beloved movie, most of them coming-of-age films, and I really felt like that vibe came through in the songs.
     
    Patterns in Traffic likes this.
  20. SuNDaYSTaR Apr 2, 2025
    SuNDaYSTaR

    Trusted Prestigious

    This. I'm the same age as you, and I thought I was younger than most people who listened to these songs.
     
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  21. Craig Manning Apr 2, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    I posted on the Counting Crows message boards pretty regularly when I was 13/14, and I was definitely the youngest person over there by several years. So, all of this tracks.
     
    SuNDaYSTaR likes this.
  22. somethingliketj Apr 2, 2025
    somethingliketj

    And that's why you always leave a note.

    All-timer song right here.
     
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  24. soggytime Apr 2, 2025
    soggytime

    Trusted

    Really loving this series so far. Truly have no idea how I would narrow it down for my own musical journey
     
    MarkM and Craig Manning like this.
  25. Craig Manning Apr 2, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    I’m still swapping out some of the later songs in the feature, lol. So, definitely a lot of second-guessing involved.
     
  26. Toner Apr 5, 2025
    Toner

    A Welshy in London Supporter

    I remember visiting Florida with my family in late 2001 for a couple of weeks and doing a big blowout trip of all the theme parks. We joked every time we got in the car that we would probably hear "Hanging By A Moment" on the radio before reaching our destination and cheered every time we did.

    We loved the song back then and I still love it to this day. It reminds me of family adventures and always has a guaranteed place whenever I put together a road trip playlist. I clearly need to seek out a Minivan Rock playlist for the next big road trip now that I know what to call that time capsule of a sub-genre.

    Thanks for sharing Craig. I was also a charts freak around that time and it was certainly formative in what I consider to be my dearist "hobby" in discovering and listening to music. Looking forward to hearing about the other 33 songs!
     
    Craig Manning likes this.
  27. Craig Manning Apr 6, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator

    You had the definitive Minivan Rock experience! The Billboard guys would love this story.

    Thanks for reading and for sharing your memories of this song!
     
  28. Craig Manning Apr 8, 2025
    Craig Manning

    @FurtherFromSky Moderator