Shimmer

Fuel guitarist Carl Bell wrote this about an ex-girlfriend who is trapped in a bad marriage. Bell told the VH1 Storytellers crowd that he fell in love with the girl right after high school and was devastated when she left him for another man, the same man she ended up marrying. When she phoned Bell one night and confided her relationship woes, he felt a range of emotions that came out on "Shimmer."

Peaking at #2 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, this was held off from the top spot by the Goo Goo Dolls smash "Iris." But Bell didn't mind. He told Pass The Aux: "I always said to people, if there was any song I would play second fiddle to and I had to do it, it would be that song. I'm OK playing second fiddle to 'Iris' because that's a song I always liked and always wished I had wrote that song."

20 years after its release, Bell was still proud of the song that launched the band, and reminisced about writing it. "I felt good about it for sure when I wrote it," he told Pass The Aux in 2018. "I knew the chord changes were nice. It's got that C-chord with an open string running through it. It was a movable position on the neck. It has this nice chimey sound to the chord changes. I remember liking that. I love that little string-line that was going to be in there."