Benny Mardones was an American singer-songwriter with one soaring rock ballad that had the rare distinction of becoming a hit twice. "Into the Night", released in 1980, is a dramatic, big-voiced love song, and it reached the US top twenty, then did so again on a 1989 re-release, a decade-spanning success very few one-hit acts can claim.
Mardones kept performing for a devoted following, but nothing else he recorded approached the reach of that one impassioned ballad.
On streaming, "Into the Night" sits near 46 million plays, and its other top entries are alternate versions of the same song. His next distinct track trails far behind. That puts the ratio above 5, over our line.
By our measure Benny Mardones is a certified one-hit wonder, with the unusual footnote that his single hit charted in two different decades. It is simply that one soaring, dramatic ballad became his entire public story, a song so beloved that radio brought it back years later, standing far ahead of everything else he recorded. Few one-hit wonders can say their lone hit charted twice, a decade apart, and on streams "Into the Night" remains almost the entirety of what listeners know him for.