"Low" is a song by American rock band Cracker. It appears on their 1993 album, Kerosene Hat.[2] "Low", a sleeper hit, reached number 64 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 1994. The song's biggest success was on the rock charts, reaching number three on the BillboardModern Rock Tracks chart in November 1993 and number five on the BillboardAlbum Rock Tracks chart in March 1994. The music video, directed by Carlos Grasso, portrays lead singer David Lowery losing a boxing match with actress and comedian Sandra Bernhard.[3]
In 2013, Lowery posted an essay on his Trichordist site focused on "Low" in the era of streaming music. The headline was "My Song Got Played on Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!" The post went viral and continues to be a reference point in the debate over the economics of streaming music.[4]
Background
David Lowery has said that the band's label made him write a letter to radio stations denying that the song was about drugs, claiming that the repeated phrase "being stoned" was really "being stone." Lowery paraphrased a label executive as telling him, "I don't believe you and neither will anyone else, but there needs to be deniability and this is what we're gonna say."[3]