Songoftheday 11/4/21 - In my shoes my toes are busted my kitchen says my bread is molded, got a good job at the dollar store...

 

 

"Better Days (And The Bottom Drops Out)" - Citizen King

from the album Mobile Estates (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #25 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 12

 

Today's song comes from the band Citizen King, who came together in the early 1990s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After releasing their debut album Brown Bag independently, they were signed to Warner Brother Records, and seemed to be the label's answer to Sugar Ray - a rock band with a "turntable guy" in the mix doing a fusion of ska-rock and hip-hop. The group released their first and only album with Warners, Mobile Estates, in 1999. The lead single, "Better Days (and the Bottom Drops Out)" was written by the act's lead singer/bassist Matt Sims and keyboardist Dave Cooley, who both produced the track with Eric Alexander. The song even sounds like a Sugar Ray outtakes, along with the downtrodden young man angst and requisite record scratching. The music video, which makes light of freezing to death in a supermaket freezer, nevertheless spotlighted Sims, whose incredibly good looks are topped by that frosted tip style both Mark McGrath and Steve Harwell sported. And that may have been enough to grab attention at radio, giving the band their biggest success...

"Better Days" became Citizen King's first and only top-40 pop hit in August of 1999. The song also made the top ten on both the Alternative Rock (one week at #3) and Adult Top-40 (#10) radio charts in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single peaked at #20 in Canada, and was a minor hit in Australia (#86) and Germany (#95). The Mobile Estates album, released in March of that year, failed to make the Billboard 200 sales chart, and with neither of their two follow-ups making any notice, this would be their last hurrah, and they broke up in 2002. Since then, Cooley has had the biggest success of all of them behind the scenes, producing bands like Silversun Pickups and Tame Impala, while Sims went solo as "Mount Sims", releasing three albums independently, with his first, UltraSex, including "How We Do", which had grabbed an audience with the snowboarding crowd and has over two million streams on Spotify. 

(5/10)

Up tomorrow: Another New Mickey Mouse Club alumnus rubs it the right way to go to #1.