CNN
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Linda Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time” appeared not once, but three times on Sunday’s episode of “The Last of Us.” And fans of HBO’s new favorite were moved by Ronstadt’s singing, her ballad streams after the show aired.
Between 11:00pm and midnight on Sunday, Spotify’s “Long, Long Time” streams increased by 4,900% compared to the platform a week ago. reported this week. CNN reached out to Spotify to confirm the number of streams before and after “The Last of Us” aired. Meanwhile, the song is already trending on TikToks from teary viewers who loved the show.
The song was performed by actors Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman in a pivotal sequence in the third episode of “The Last of Us,” in which their characters meet by chance, taking turns playing Ronstadt’s song on an antique piano at different times and sharing a kiss (and eventually, nearly 20 years into their lives). The episode closes with Ronstadt’s rendition of the song played on the cassette tape.
I knew series co-creator Craig Mazin needed to hit something about longing and pain and endless love.
Ronstadt In 1970, it was released as a single from her second album, “Silk Bag”. It charted at No. 25 on Billboard for 12 weeks. It was her first single to appear on the Billboard charts.
It is the renewed interest in Ronstadt’s ballad. Draw comparisons Kate Bush’s power ballad “Running That Hill (A Deal With God)” rode a wave of hits last year when it appeared on several episodes of “Stranger Things.” Almost 40 years after it was first released, Bush’s signature song returned to the charts, reaching No. 1i in the UK and No. 4 in the US. In the year In 1985, the song peaked at number 30, according to Billboard. When the fourth season of “Stranger Things” aired at the end of May, “Running Up That Mountain” hit the net with millions of streams per day.
The Über-popular series, especially with a large Gen Z audience, has shown a unique power to inspire certain songs, especially on TikTok. “Euphoria” introduced young viewers to the 70s jam “Right Down the Line” by Jerry Rafferty, Zendaya’s character Ru featured more than once in the series’ second season. And it also resonated with millions of people on TikTok: the hashtag #bottomright has been viewed more than 5 million times on the app, and more than 34,000 videos use the official version of the song as a soundtrack. (HBO, home of “The Last of Us” and “Euphoria,” shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)
Netflix’s mega hit “Wednesday,” which broke viewership records previously held by “Stranger Things,” featured a viral scene set to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” in which the daughter of the Addams Family performed an unusual dance to a punk anthem. A clip of the Netflix show has garnered more than 43 million views and Google searched for the song in early December, after the show was streamed. But if the scene is indirect, Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” inspired her 2011 album “Born This Way.” Millions of Tik Tok users followed their eager attempts to replicate the “Wednesday” dance to Gaga’s vampy deep groove, which made the song its first ever hit on the Billboard charts (albeit Gaga’s 36th entry on the Billboard Hot 100).
Meanwhile, Ronstadt’s ballad isn’t even the first song featured in “The Last of Us” to grab fans’ attention. Billboard reports that the pilot episode of Depeche Mode’s “Don’t Download It Again” has tripled its streams to 26,000 overnight. Depeche Mode’s official YouTube account even added a parenthesis to the song’s music video title: “(The Last We Heard Part 1).
So far, few of the recent old-songs-turned-new hits have reached the same level as Bush’s “Running Up That Mountain” last year, but the success of “The Last of Us” has been nothing short of extraordinary.
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