3 Iconic Musicians Who Didn’t Believe in the Song That Made Them Famous

It’s important to believe in yourself and your art if you want to become a successful musician. However, on rare occasions, some musicians found their fame in songs that they really didn’t believe in. Some of them scribbled them out because of pressures from their label, others released them to little initial success and had no hope for a re-release. 

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Let’s look at just a few rock-leaning examples of such songs whose makers had little hope in their success. A couple of these tracks might just surprise you.

Warrant

Like many bands at the time, in the late 1980s, glam metal outfit Warrant’s label wanted a radio-friendly single that would pull in some positive attention. The band put together the lyrics of “Cherry Pie” in about 15 minutes, scribbling the words on the back of a pizza box. They thought it would be a filler track. However, upon its release as a single in 1989, “Cherry Pie” would become the band’s signature song. The glam metal hit peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Aerosmith

When it comes to the track “Dream On”, it comes as no surprise that Aerosmith didn’t really see the song going anywhere. When it was first released, it barely charted. Fortunately, though, two years later, “Dream On” became a massive hit when it was re-released during the band’s breakthrough era. The original version of the song didn’t even break the Top 40 in 1973. Upon its re-release in 1976, “Dream On” was a No. 6 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

“It was just this little thing I was playing, and I never dreamed it would end up as a real song or anything,” Steven Tyler said of the track.

Nirvana

Nirvana’s rise to fame was meteoric, as was the whole of grunge’s rise to mainstream popularity. And yet, Kurt Cobain makes it to our list of musicians who didn’t believe their biggest songs would become so huge. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was very much Cobain’s attempt at a pop song. Not only did he call his own work “clichéd,” but the rest of the band also dismissed it. They recorded it anyway, and it would become Nirvana’s biggest hit at No. 6 on the Hot 100 in 1991.

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