Smash Mouth’s Steve Harwell thought ‘All Star’ could be big. ‘Shrek’ made it an earworm.

“What the f— is this?” Harwell had requested, he later recalled to Rolling Stone.

The track would sooner or later be referred to as “All Star,” the marvel 1999 hit that served as a radio-friendly pop-rock anthem for outcasts and that put the San Jose band on charts all over the world.

“I just knew right away — this thing’s going to be everywhere. It’s going to be played at every basketball game, hockey game,” Harwell recalled to Boston radio station WBUR in 2018. “You’re going to hear ‘All Star’ — just like you always hear ‘Hells Bells’ or ‘Back in Black.’”

But “All Star” earned earworm standing two years after its unencumber no longer on account of the arenas and stadiums it was once performed in. Instead, the track soared to new heights when it was once featured within the opening of “Shrek,” the 2001 animated comedy about an embittered ogre whose swamp house has grow to be overrun by means of fairy-tale creatures banished by means of an obsessive ruler. The spice up “All Star” were given from “Shrek” would later flip Smash Mouth’s greatest track right into a staple of web meme tradition within the 2010s, making it without end inescapable.

“We had no clue how big ‘Shrek’ was going to be. We had no clue,” Harwell instructed Rolling Stone in 2019, including: “The song was reborn again.”

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Harwell died Monday at 56. The band’s supervisor, Robert Hayes, showed Harwell’s passing, which came about on the singer’s house in Boise, Idaho, in a remark to media retailers and a Facebook post.

Harwell had liver failure and was once resting at house whilst being cared for by means of his fiancée, Hayes stated Sunday, including: “We would hope people would respect Steve and his family’s privacy during this difficult time.” Harwell introduced his retirement in October 2021 to concentrate on his bodily and psychological well being after a efficiency in Upstate New York, movies of which display him in an it sounds as if disoriented state. He struggled with dependancy through the years, resulting in well being headaches, together with cardiomyopathy, which ends up from a weakening of the guts muscle, that affected his speech and reminiscence, Hayes stated.

“Steve Harwell was a true American Original. A larger than life character who shot up into the sky like a Roman candle,” Smash Mouth wrote on X, previously referred to as Twitter. “Steve will be remembered for his unwavering focus and impassioned determination to reach the heights of pop stardom.” The band nonetheless excursions, with Zach Goode as its lead vocalist.

Although Smash Mouth discovered luck in its 1997 debut album, “Fush Yu Mang,” critics questioned whether or not “Walkin’ on the Sun” would go away the band as a one-hit marvel. At the crowning glory of the gang’s 2d album, “Astro Lounge,” executives at Interscope Records instructed Greg Camp, the band’s number one songwriter and guitarist, that what Smash Mouth had given the label wasn’t marketable.

“They’re just like, ‘Where’s the hit?’” Camp recalled to WBUR. “‘This isn’t it. You got a second single. You got a third single. Maybe a fourth single. But not a first single. We’re not gonna put this out until you give us something better than this.’”

Camp picked up a Billboard mag and was once compelled to invite himself a query he hadn’t needed to ask ahead of: “What do people listen to these days?” As he began to put in writing, he thought of all of the fan mail the band had won from younger individuals who stated they have been being bullied. Some have been picked on for a way they dressed, others for merely liking Smash Mouth.

“We were reading a lot of fan mail, back when people actually wrote things on paper,” Camp instructed NPR in 2018. “We were reading all these things, and we were like: ‘Man, all these kids had or are having the same problems that we had when we were kids. Let’s do a song.’”

With his undertaking in thoughts, Camp questioned what the track’s identify could be. That’s when he regarded down on the sneakers he was once dressed in — Converse All Stars — and knew what the track would be referred to as. Keyboardist Michael Klooster recounted to VoicesRiverCity.com in 2017 about how Camp had instructed his band contributors about how he were running on two new songs.

“I remember talking to him, he goes, … ‘There’s one I really like. One I kind of hate, but I think it’s gonna work,’” Klooster stated, relating to “All Star.”

Harwell heard the demo tape Camp had put in combination and knew he could flip it right into a Smash Mouth track — the Smash Mouth track.

“I’m not going to toot my own horn, but nobody else could have sang that song. It would have never been what it is now,” Harwell stated in 2019. “I could’ve pitched that song to a million bands and they would have tried to do it, and it would’ve never been what it is.”

Hailed by means of critics as “the perfect summer anthem,” Smash Mouth’s “All Star” was once reputedly far and wide after it was once launched in May 1999: the tops of charts, venues around the nation, Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby, the Grammy Awards.

“I just said at one point, ‘I think this song will definitely do what the record company wants it to do, but you may potentially fly your band straight into the sun with this song,’” manufacturer Eric Valentine recalled to WBUR. “Because there’s no turning back from this.”

Though “All Star” had gave the impression in different movie soundtracks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, then the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, had an offer for what he sought after to be performed over the hole of “Shrek.”

“Why don’t you just use ‘All Star’?” Katzenberg requested composer Matt Mahaffey, who labored on “Shrek,” consistent with the Ringer.

Even regardless that Mahaffey to begin with didn’t wish to use a track that was once a few years previous and that was once featured in different motion pictures, the verdict paid off. The option to license the track to “Shrek,” which grossed nearly $500 million international, was once a part of Hayes’s option to make “All Star” as unavoidable as conceivable in on a regular basis lifestyles.

“I licensed the crap out of that song,” the executive instructed Rolling Stone. “You could not walk into a grocery store or turn on the television without hearing ‘All Star.’ It was very, very saturated.”

Years after the peak of the track’s luck, the primary traces of “All Star” have been morphed right into a meme system of YouTube posters remixing the 1999 hit for their very own comedic functions. Among the preferred is a model of “All Star” during which Harwell is making a song “somebody” over and over.

Harwell stated lately that the band had embraced its standing as meme influencers, acknowledging that he and the opposite bandmates had authorised “All Star” as their legacy.

“At first it was weird, and we were a bit guarded and resistant,” Harwell stated to Polygon in 2017 concerning the memes. “But as we dove into it more and focused on it we started ‘getting it.’”

The Smash Mouth frontman had stated he was once fortunate that the band made “one of those songs” that folks can’t break out from.

After Harwell’s demise was once introduced Monday, the YouTube consumer who posted the “somebody” meme video up to date the caption to honor the Smash Mouth singer: “Thanks for singing the greatest song ever made.”