Norman Greenbaum is an American musician who belongs to the very purest category of one-hit wonder: a single, indelible song and almost nothing else in the public memory. "Spirit in the Sky", released in 1969, is a fuzzed-out, gospel-tinged rock anthem about going to heaven, written by a Jewish artist about Christian salvation, and its crunchy guitar riff has made it a permanent fixture of films, adverts, and radio.
Greenbaum recorded other material, but none of it registered, and the song has comfortably outlived its era, licensed endlessly across the decades for its instantly uplifting sound.
On streaming, "Spirit in the Sky" sits near 655 million plays, while his next track trails at well under a million. That sends the ratio into the hundreds, one of the most extreme figures in our entire database.
By our measure Norman Greenbaum is a certified one-hit wonder of the starkest possible kind. His catalogue, on the numbers, is essentially one song, a gloriously fuzzy meditation on the afterlife that has proved far more immortal than almost anything else from its year, while everything around it has vanished.