Smash Mouth’s Steve Harwell, who died Monday at 56, predicted that “All Star” would be popular for years. “Shrek” helped make it the earworm and meme it became.
Although Smash Mouth found success in its 1997 debut album, “Fush Yu Mang,” critics wondered whether “Walkin’ on the Sun” would leave the band as a one-hit wonder. At the completion of the group’s second album, “Astro Lounge,” executives at Interscope Records told Greg Camp, the band’s primary songwriter and guitarist, that what Smash Mouth had given the label wasn’t marketable.
“I remember talking to him, he goes, … ‘There’s one I really like. One I kind of hate, but I think it’s gonna work,’” Klooster said, referring to “All Star.”Harwell heard the demo tape Camp had put together and knew he could turn it into a Smash Mouth song —“I’m not going to toot my own horn, but nobody else could have sang that song. It would have never been what it is now,” Harwell said in 2019.
“I licensed the crap out of that song,” the manager told Rolling Stone. “You could not walk into a grocery store or turn on the television without hearing ‘All Star.’ It was very, very saturated.”
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