American Authors are an American pop-rock band who, for a stretch in the mid-2010s, owned one of the most inescapable feel-good songs of its moment. "Best Day of My Life", released in 2013, was a banjo-flecked, foot-stomping anthem of relentless optimism, and its chant-along chorus made it a fixture of adverts, sports broadcasts, and film trailers.
That ubiquity was both a blessing and a trap. The song became shorthand for cheerful montage music, but it also overshadowed everything the band did afterward, none of which approached the same scale.
On streaming, "Best Day of My Life" sits near 1.3 billion plays, while their next most-streamed track, "I'm Born to Run", trails at around 151 million. That puts the ratio above 8, past our 5.0 line.
By our measure American Authors are a certified one-hit wonder. Theirs is a particularly clear case of sync-driven success: a song engineered, intentionally or not, for maximum licensability, which became so tied to commercials and highlight reels that it crowded out the rest of the band's identity. One relentlessly upbeat anthem carries the catalogue, and probably always will.