The history of the band Lit who is best known for the song 'My Own Worst Enemy'
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Few songs really capture the late 90’s like the Lit’s track My Own Worst Enemy. It was a long winding road for Lit to achieve success and through their 30 plus year career, they’d change their musical styles, deal with tragedy and their hit song pretty much became a self fulfilling prophecy. But whatever happened to the band Lit. That’s what were going to explore in today’s video.
The band’s origins begin with frontman AJ Popoff and his brother Jeremy who is 2 years older They would hail from Fullerton, in Orange County.
AJ went out to his 64 cadillac got his notepad and wrote that lyric he had. The next piece of the song was that memorable guitar riff which jeremy came up with. The band started to play along and AJ wasn’t sure what to sing, but then he remembered that lyric he jotted down at the gas bar Based on interviews the members gave it was written pretty quickly between 30 min to an hour.
The studio version that ended up on Lit’s subsequent release is pretty close to the demo. AJ would recall to SPin Back in those days, when we were writing a song, we would put filler words in there just to have something to sing, something to chew on while we were making it. Then when we would get closer, we’d go back to those, and then we’d just go in and fine-tune the words before we would demo them up or record or whatever, but that one just took off from under us. We demoed it up the way it was because people were freaking out…[If we’d written it now] we would’ve totally gone back and fixed a bunch of those words…and thank God we didn’t. The song is autobgioraphical, admitting to screwing up, but at the same time not saying you want do it again. The band was into partying, but they were more into playing poker and drinking almost every weekend, not doing beer bongs or playing beer pong.
The band would premiere the song live at the troubadour in late 1998 and audiences and even their fellow bands loved it. Fellow orange county band Zebrahead who was already signed was at that show and one the members told the band that the song was a hit. The band by this point were attracting bigger and bigger crowds and label reps were showing up at a lot of shows around Orange County. Lit would finally sign with RCA Records after reps heard their demo and saw them perform my own worst enemy live.
The band would head to NRG recording studio in north hollywood - with producer Don Gilmore who worked with Linkin Park and Eve 6. The song’s were about 90-95% finished by this point. RCA would issue A Place in the Sun on February 23, 1999. The title was reference to Frank Sinatra’s old stomping ground in vegas The Sands hotel. The band’s sound would see comparisons to Third Eye Blind, early elvis costello and social distortion.
The band’s manager would admit on the band’s podcast that payola was pretty common at this time - labels paying radio stations to play their artists music. She believed in my own worst enemy so much she forbade RCA from using payola to get the song on radio stations as it would hurt the legitimacy of the band. -. She asked RCA to call certain radio stations and tell them they would get the lead single my own worst enemy early. The song was sent to a station in St. Louis who was the first station to play the song. By January of 99 a month before the album’s release KROQ started playing the song and the label and the band were surprised at the response. My Own Worst Enemy was being played almost every 2 hours on KROQ and the audience was eating it up.
By April, My Own worst enemy topped the alternative airplay charts where it stayed for 11 consecutive weeks. Couple this with heavy play on mtv and the song was inescapable. It soon became one of the most popular songs of the summer in 1999. The success of the song resulted in a place in the sun going gold by June of 1999 and platinum in October. It would eventually go on to sell nearly 1.5 million copies.
Lit had two more successful singles on the record including miserable and zip-lock with them peaking at at number 3 and nu