You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

There are some songs that you've heard over and over and over again throughout your life.

Closing time by Semisonic is one of those songs for me and I think for a lot of people.

And I always figured I knew what the song was about, closing time at a bar.

But it turns out there's more to the story.

And in this episode, Dan Wilson, the singer and songwriter of the band Semisonic, tells the whole story.

Closing time came out in March 1998 that hit number one on the alternative charts and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rocks on.

It gets played in stadiums, weird, outcovered it, and it's the last song of the night in countless bars.

In the years since the song came out, Dan has gone on to become a powerhouse songwriter,

who's written or co-written for artists like John Legend and Taylor Swift, and he's won Grammys for his songwriting with the Dixie Chicks and Adele.

But over two decades ago, Dan and his bandmates, John Munson and Jacob Slickter, were in Minneapolis, getting ready to start work on their second album, Feeling Strangely Fine.

I'm Dan Wilson.

I first started writing Closing Time in a big batch of songs in late 96 or early 97.

Semisonic had gotten off tour after a long stretch, and John and Jacob and I were thinking about what to do for next record.

And I specifically remember among their requests to me in this batch of music was a new song to end our shows with.

Before Feeling Strangely Fine, I would write a song when I felt like it, but I was trying to write a song every day, and eventually we had about 60 songs that I had written.

And a lot of them were not great, but I think I wrote Closing Time in the middle of that giant batch of songs.

It was in John's basement that I first played Closing Time for John and Jacob, and the first demo is me down in that basement playing it for them.

Almost all of Semisonic's songs, I wrote on a Guild F30, a little acoustic guitar.

And I thought of the title Closing Time literally because of the request from John and Jacob for a new closer for our sets.

Closing Time turned our love lights on, all the way to every boy and every girl.

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