He followed up with 2014’s Love Without Fear and 2017’s covers album Re-Covered. Throughout the band’s long hiatus, Wilson worked on his solo career, collaborating with famed producer Rick Rubin for his 2007 debut Free Life. It was even mockingly covered by Justin Timberlake in 2011’s Friends with Benefits when co-star Mila Kunis asked him to sing a Third Eye Blind song post-coitus.įollowing the success of “Closing Time” and the Platinum-selling Feeling Strangely Fine, Semisonic released its third album All About Chemistry in 2001 and re-released Feeling Strangely Fine on vinyl to commemorate its 20th anniversary in 2018. The single also became a pop-culture staple, popping up everywhere from The Office to The Simpsons. The catchiness and sincerity of “Closing Time” caught mainstream attention, topping Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart and earning a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song. I had birth on the brain, I was struck by what a funny pun it was to be bounced from the womb.”
My wife and I were expecting our first kid very soon after I wrote that song. If taken at face value, “Closing Time” is indeed a “last call” anthem, but Wilson intended for a double meaning: “It’s just, ‘Okay, you’ve got to go out into the light, make your way home, or wherever you’re going to be.’ Partway into the writing of the song, I realized it was also about being born. “Because all the bars that I would frequent in Minneapolis, they would yell out ‘closing time.’ There was one bar where a guy always would scream really loud, ‘You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,’ and I guess that always stuck in my mind. So I set out to write a new closer for the set, and I just thought, ‘Oh, closing time,’” Wilson told American Songwriter in 2019. John and Jake were always impatient with ending the show with the same song. “We had always ended with a song called ‘If I Run,’ and I really liked it a lot.
The song grew out of a much-needed change to the band’s setlists. Soon, the drums come crashing down on the singalong-ready chorus: “I know who I want to take me home!” “Closing Time” begins as an inconspicuous ballad, with Wilson’s modest vocals pouring over a tinkling guitar riff.
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