9 One-Hit Wonders and What the Artists Did Next

A song can climb to the top of the charts and still leave its creator oddly hard to find a few years later. Radio plays it, wedding DJs keep it alive, and the artist behind it slips out of the headlines. That gap is what makes these stories interesting.

The nine acts below each had one defining hit, at least in the United States. What came afterward ranged from television renovations to production work to a quiet return to the day job.

Vanilla Ice and the Home Renovation Pivot

His 1990 single Ice Ice Baby became the first hip hop single to top the Billboard Hot 100. It sold in huge numbers and made him a household name almost overnight. The follow up material never matched it, and his mainstream moment faded fast.

Years later, he reinvented himself as a property flipper. Starting around 2010, he fronted The Vanilla Ice Project on the DIY Network, which followed his home renovations in Florida. The show gave him a second public life, one built on drywall instead of dance moves.

Gotye and the Quiet Step Back

Belgian born Australian musician Wally De Backer, known as Gotye, hit global success with Somebody That I Used to Know. The song reached number one in the United States in 2012 and spent several weeks there. It also earned him Grammy wins, including Record of the Year.

Rather than chase a follow up, he went back to his long running band The Basics. He has largely kept the Gotye project dormant since then. It’s a rare case of an artist treating a giant hit as one chapter, not the whole book.

Thomas Dolby and the Technology Career

Thomas Dolby reached the American top five in 1983 with She Blinded Me With Science, helped along by an inventive music video on early MTV. His synthesizer heavy sound fit the moment perfectly. Yet the hit was a bit of an outlier in his catalog.

He later moved into technology. He founded Beatnik, a company whose audio software was used to power polyphonic ringtones on mobile phones. He eventually took an academic post at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in its arts and media programs.

The Buggles and the Producer Behind the Curtain

The Buggles scored a worldwide hit in 1979 with Video Killed the Radio Star. It was famously the first music video aired on MTV in 1981. The duo, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, made only a small number of albums together.

Their real success came afterward. Downes joined Yes and later helped form Asia, while Horn became one of the most sought after record producers in pop, working with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and others. In a sense, the one hit act produced two substantial careers.

Chumbawamba and the Long Road to a Final Bow

Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping peaked at number six on the US Hot 100 in 1997. Its chant along chorus made it inescapable that year. For American listeners, it was effectively the band’s only visible moment.

The group, however, had formed in the early 1980s and had a long history in anarchist punk circles in England. They kept recording and touring for years after the hit. They announced their breakup in 2012, closing a career that lasted around three decades.

The Knack and the Sharona Hangover

The Knack’s My Sharona spent six weeks at number one in 1979 and was the biggest US single of that year. Their debut album sold strongly, and the band was briefly hailed as the next big thing. A fast backlash followed, and later singles did not repeat the success.

The band split in the early 1980s, then reunited in the 1990s and kept playing in various forms. Drummer Bruce Gary died in 2006, and singer Doug Fieger died in 2010. The song itself has lived on in films, commercials and countless playlists.

Tommy Tutone and the Famous Phone Number

Tommy Tutone’s 867-5309/Jenny reached number four on the Hot 100 in 1982. The song’s phone number hook led to real people receiving prank calls for years. It remains the band’s signature moment by a wide margin.

Frontman Tommy Heath kept performing under the Tommy Tutone name after the hit faded. The group became a staple of nostalgia tours and retro radio features. They never returned to the upper chart reaches, but the song never went away.

Norman Greenbaum and the Farm Life

Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky reached number three in the US in 1969. Its fuzzy guitar riff has made it a favorite in film and television soundtracks ever since. He wrote it himself, so the royalties from its constant reuse have been significant.

After he failed to repeat the success, he stepped away from the spotlight. He worked in a range of jobs outside music, including running a farm in California. The song kept earning for him in the background.

Los del Río and the Macarena Afterlife

The Spanish duo Los del Río, Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz, released Macarena in the early 1990s. The Bayside Boys remix then topped the Hot 100 in 1996 for fourteen weeks. It became one of the most recognizable dance crazes of the decade.

Back home, the pair were already established performers, and they carried on recording and touring in Spain and Latin America. Their fame outside the Spanish speaking world stayed tied to that one song. Within their own market, though, they remained working musicians with a long career behind them.