Walkin' On The Sun

The jaunty melody belies the serious nature of this song, which is about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The song was written by the group's guitarist Greg Camp, who told Songfacts: "The song was basically a social and racial battle cry. It was a sort of 'Can't we all get along?' song for the time when I wrote it. It was just about all the things that were going on around me as a young person. And I'm, like, God, what is going on? I don't understand why this is happening. It's like we might as well be walking around a planet on fire." The riots took place after four white police officers were acquitted after a videotaped beating of a black motorist named Rodney King. "Can't we all get along?" was King's famous quote during a news conference to address the riots.

"Walkin' on the Sun" was Smash Mouth's first major-label single and their breakout hit. The group is from San Jose, California, where they had a supporter in Carson Daly, at the time a DJ at the alternative rock radio station KOME. In April 1996, the group was unsigned, but KOME put their song "Nervous in the Alley" in rotation anyway, and later added ""Walkin' on the Sun." Soon after, Daly moved to the mighty Los Angeles station KROQ, where he continued to champion the song and give it airplay. Other stations followed suit, attracting lots of attention to the band, which was courted by a passel of record labels. They signed with Interscope, which released "Walkin' on the Sun" as their first single in 1997. It landed at #1 on the Modern Rock chart and #2 on the Airplay chart (the song wasn't sold as a single, so it wasn't eligible for the Hot 100), helping the album Fush Yu Mang sell over 2 million copies.

The song interpolates the keyboard riff from the 1966 single "Swan's Splashdown" by the electronic music duo Perrey and Kingsley (Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley), which gives it a '60s retro sound. The mixing of musical genres and eras served Smash Mouth well and helped set the tone for their future hits.