What was the first independently released album to hit number one?
While indie is now an umbrella term for an entire genre and can be used as a prefix or suffix for any manner of word that describes a moment in culture – indie-sleaze and landfill-indie being my favourites – it’s actually meant to signify whether or not a record is independent. An independent record can be defined as something released without the structure, funding, or control of a majorly owned label.
So what makes an independent record hitting number one status such an achievement? While music is a creative endeavour, it’s still not immune to mass commercialism and is ultimately run by large corporations. The vast majority of popular music is released by the big three record labels: Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. Within that, they have smaller subsidiary labels with different names, but ultimately, they are still directly involved with their release and pocked most of the profits.
As a result, they have larger budgets to push marketing campaigns, organise bigger shows and tours, and provide a more influential industry voice that ultimately results in broader exposure. So when it comes to how songs fare in the charts, the results between songs released from said labels and those independently read like most traditional David vs Goliath stories.
However, the very essence of independent music has led an entire genre to be called ‘indie’. It indicates a spirit and authenticity that exists solely within the art that isn’t beholding to corporate agreements and money-making intentions. This is why the genre has grown over the past few decades, and certain songs and albums have struck the hearts of music fans, cutting through the humdrum of society and giving it unexpectedly high positions within the charts.
In modern times, music charts have mirrored genres and split into a myriad of sub-charts that make the quest to find the true answer to this question slightly challenging. The most famous example of a number one indie hit in recent years was Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ ‘Thrift Shop’, which spent six weeks at number one. A song about the life of a second-hand shopper was an appropriately defiant, independent single to break through the noise of commercial pop.
While that is the most famous and long-standing example, research largely points towards 1990s folk-pop singer Lisa Loeb being the originator of the feat. The unsigned singer-songwriter recorded her track ‘Stay (I Missed You)’ at the Berklee School of Music in Boston as part of her then-band Nine Stories. She spent most of her time handing out free cassettes after gigs, but it was her neighbour and actor Ethan Hawke who helped propel her song into the mainstream.
The 1994 film Reality Bites, which Hawke starred in, featured Loeb’s song on its soundtrack and was thus played to thousands of cinema-goers. Loeb and Hawke were mutual friends in New York’s downtown theatre scene and, upon hearing her song, gave a copy to the film’s director, Ben Stiller. At the time, Loeb’s track was simply called ‘Stay’ and was referenced in the movie as such. But following the film’s release and track’s subsequent chart-climb, Loeb changed the name to ‘Stay (I Missed You)’ in the hope of establishing a more independent name within the charts. Three months after its release, on July 12th, 1994, the track reached gold status.
Compositionally, it’s a song that exercises many of the tropes we now come to associate with indie music. A hearty, folky melody with an intricate narrative woven in its fabric, it’s a song sung in its own authentic voice. And while it blazed a trail for independent artists thereafter, it’s arguably one of the first songs to really utilise a multi-platform approach, crossing the void from audio to visual and propelling it to new heights of independent stardom.
