A few years ago I was in the parking lot of a grocery store and this song was playing on the radio. Within seconds, another car pulled in the lot and had this song on too. Then another car pulled up a few seconds after and guess what they were listening to as well? I guess Marcy Playground owned all the attention at that moment. I always thought that was pretty cool.
Sex and Candy was released as a single in November of 1997 from the band’s debut album. It became their breakthrough single spending 15 weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. It beat out Oasis’ Wonderwall which had previously held the spot for 10 weeks. The lyrics were written by the band’s front man John Wozniak.
Song facts did an interview with Wozniak and he talked about the lyrics. “Well, I was dating a girl and she was going to Bryn Mawr College and it’s where my dad teaches. And I was probably 17 or something like that and she was like 18. I always liked the older girls. (laughs) But we were in her dorm room, and her roommate came in and she saw us there, and she was like, “Oh, it smells like sex and candy in here.” And I always remembered that. And that was back in the late ‘80s.”
He continued on to say, “And then when I was writing the song and I was coming up with all these weird disco-era references that I was making up, “platform double suede” and all that business, I was like, hey, let’s just throw in that phrase that’s been sticking in my head for the last 5 years or whatever. So I wrote that song in ’92, ’93, somewhere around there. And it didn’t really come out until ’97. That song had been at least in my consciousness since the late ‘80s. At least with the concepts behind it. “
