1987 One-Hit Wonder, Written When Singer Was Half-Asleep, Took Nearly a Year to Hit No. 1
There was definitely no shortage of catchy songs on the radio during the late '80s, but one of the absolute catchiest was without a doubt Terence Trent D'Arby's "Wishing Well" (as anyone who's walked around with that whistling hook stuck their head can tell you).
Released in June 1987 as the second single from D'Arby's debut album, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby, the song was an enormous hit...but not at first. In fact, "Wishing Well" didn't make it all the way to the very top of the Billboard Hot 100 until nearly a year later, on May 7, 1988, after months of radio and MTV airplay.
D'Arby's somewhat overconfident style of self-promotion no doubt helped to send "Wishing Well" to the top of the charts, too. As Stereogum reported, the young singer called his first record "the most brilliant debut album from any artist this decade."
By the next year, D'Arby was backpedaling a bit on his earlier claims.
"I was joking," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I was making fun of the image I had built up, the whole arrogance thing... A lot of it was what I truly believed, but a lot of it was exaggerated to make a point. You have to hit people over the head to make them notice, and I did it. I know how to play the game."
Considering D'Arby's rock star-style swagger, it's no surprise he slipped a Rolling Stones reference into his biggest hit. "Wishing Well" features a shout-out to the classic song "Midnight Rambler" in one verse:
Hugging like a monkey see, monkey do
Right beside a riverboat gambler, hahaha
Erotic images float through my head
Say you wanna be a midnight rambler
(I wanna be a midnight rambler)
As many have pointed out over the years, "Wishing Well" doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, lyrically, but maybe that's because D'Arby wrote it when he was "in a half-asleep, half-awake state of mind," as he was quoted as saying in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits.
Of course, a song doesn't have to make sense to be a hit. And even though D'Arby now goes by the name Sananda Maitreya, all these years later, fans say he still sounds incredible singing those nonsensical words.
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This story was originally published June 12, 2026 at 6:24 PM.