SEMISONIC

Formed: 1995, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Members: Dan Wilson, guitar, lead vocals (born Guam, 20 May 1961); John Munson, vocals, guitar, bass (born St. Paul, Minnesota); Jacob Slichter, drums (born 5 April 1961).

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Feeling Strangely Fine (1998)

Hit songs since 1990: "Closing Time," "Secret Smile," "All about Chemistry"

Semisonic's moment of ascendancy in pop music in 1998 was brief, but the erudite outfit did contribute the enduring "Closing Time" to the pop canon.

Dan Wilson and John Munson first got together in Trip Shakespeare, a Minneapolis-based outfit with an eccentric pop sound conceived at Harvard University. Wilson, who had studied art in Harvard's graduate program, joined the Trip Shakespeare lineup after its first album. After three subsequent albums with the band, Wilson recruited former classmate Jacob Slichter to join him and Munson in a new band called Semisonic. Semisonic released its first album, Pleasure, in 1995 and a full-length follow-up called Great Divide on MCA Records the following year.

Semisonic's clever songwriting and tight pop-rock sound initially made little headway with radio, but Feeling Strangely Fine, released in 1996, was a major success due to the wild popularity of the single "Closing Time." Buoyed by a simple, melodic piano and Wilson's plaintive vocal, "Closing Time" balances a wistful survey of a bar scene at the end of an evening ("So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits / I hope you have found a friend"), with the narrator's exuberance over finding his own match: "I know who I want to take me home." "Closing Time" also belies some of the band's intellectual roots, as audiences puzzle over lines like "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." "Closing Time" remained at number one on Billboard 's modern rock charts for ten weeks and in the Pop Top 10 for fifteen weeks.

The follow-up single "Secret Smile," on the merits of its infectious hook ("Nobody knows it, but you've got a secret smile") and simple pop arrangement, was a hit, but it failed to capture the imagination of pop audiences in the way that its predecessor had. The same fate befell Semisonic's follow-up album, All about Chemistry, despite continued plaudits from critics for the band's clever pop sound.

Semisonic's highest profile gig since its "Closing Time" days came in 2001, when the band appeared on the Paul McCartney tribute album Listen to What the Man Said. The band paid tribute to the influential songwriting skills of the former Beatle by covering the classic "Jet."

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Great Divide (MCA, 1996); Feeling Strangely Fine (MCA, 1998); All about Chemistry (MCA, 2001).

scott tribble