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Steve Harwell, the longtime lead singer and co-founder of 1990s-era rock band Smash Mouth, has died, the band’s manager has confirmed. He was 56 years old.
The distinctively-voiced singer was born in California’s Bay Area on January 9, 1967. He entered the spotlight in 1997, when Smash Mouth’s debut single, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” reached Number one on Billboard’s rock chart. The band’s follow-up hit, 1999’s Grammy-nominated “All Star,” swiftly became ubiquitous via TV and movie soundtracks and trailers, including prime placement in the 2001 animated film, Shrek.
The song rebounded in the social media age, often used as an ironic soundtrack by YouTube and Tik Tok users; it and the band’s other singles, including 1999’s “Then The Morning Comes” and a 2001 cover of Monkees song “I’m A Believer,” are often cited as an exemplification of that era’s style of California pop rock.
In recent years, the band was better known for its jokingly combative presence on Twitter, now known as X. Via social media, the band appeared to pick fights with Bay Area sports figures including the Oakland A’s and Golden State Warrior Draymond Green. (Those tweets were a collective effort from the band, according to a 2017 report from Inverse, which would “compose tweets together, sometimes with the help their management company.”)
Harwell retired from the band in 2021, about a year after a mid-pandemic concert at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally left fans divided. According to band manager Robert Hayes, who alerted media on Sunday that Harwell was terminally ill, Harwell had been grappling with a multitude of physical and mental health issues including cardiomyopathy, which compromised his memory and speech, the Washington Post reported.
According to Hayes, Harwell also contended with substance use disorder, and was in the final stages of liver failure—a condition often associated which chronic alcohol use—when he entered hospice care at his home in Boise, Idaho Sunday. He “passed peacefully and comfortably” and was “surrounded by family and friends,” Hayes said in a statement to Rolling Stone.
Via X, Smash Mouth honored its former frontman Monday morning, describing Harwell as “A larger than life character who shot up into the sky like a Roman candle.”
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Eve Batey
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