This Time Around

"This Time Around" by Hanson

Imagine the turn of the millennium, a moment when boy bands gleamed under stadium lights and teen pop ruled the radio with a polished, manufactured sheen. Into that landscape walked three brothers from Tulsa who had already lived an entire pop fairy tale and now wanted to grow up in public. The fresh-faced trio who had set the charts ablaze with bubblegum joy a few years earlier were back, older, hungrier, and determined to be taken seriously as a band rather than a phenomenon.

From Overnight Phenomenon to Sophomore Pressure

Hanson had detonated onto the scene in 1997 with a debut that turned Isaac, Taylor, and Zac into household names almost overnight. That first wave of fame set an almost impossible bar, the kind that crushes most young acts on the rebound. Their challenge with this single was steep: convince a fickle public that they were craftsmen and not a fluke. The brothers wrote and played their own material, and they wanted that fact to matter in a marketplace that often treated young performers as interchangeable.

A Rockier, Grittier Sound

"This Time Around" served as the lead single and title track of their second major-label album, released in the spring of 2000. The song leaned into a heavier, more soulful rock texture than the sunlit pop that had made them famous, all driving rhythm and earnest vocal grit. It announced an artistic pivot, a band stretching toward something muscular and adult. The ambition was admirable, even if it placed them at odds with the glossier pop dominating the airwaves at that exact moment.

A Brief but Respectable Chart Run

The single performed solidly without recapturing the lightning of their debut era. "This Time Around" debuted at number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 22, 2000, and held that position the following week. It climbed to its peak of number 20 on May 6, 2000, a respectable showing before the descent began. The fall was swift: the song dropped to 45, then to 87 as it lost its grip on radio. In all it logged seven weeks on the Hot 100, a short stay that reflected a shifting industry more than any lack of craft. The pop marketplace of 2000 was a fortress guarded by teen idols and producer-driven hits, and a self-written rock song from a band fighting its own image faced an uphill battle for sustained airplay. The brief chart life had less to do with the music than with the moment it arrived into.

The Battle With Their Own Image

Part of the song's difficulty was the very fame that had made the brothers famous. The public had frozen them in time as the sunny kids of their debut, and convincing radio programmers to hear them as a serious rock band proved a steep climb. The trio wrote and played their own instruments, a fact that should have earned them credibility but often got lost beneath the lingering teen-pop label. The single became a line in the sand, a declaration that they intended to control their own artistic direction even if it cost them commercial momentum.

A Quiet Pivot With Lasting Resonance

History has been kinder to this era of Hanson than the charts were at the time. The record is now regarded by fans as the moment the brothers asserted creative control and stepped off the teen-idol treadmill. With roughly seven million YouTube views, the song has found a durable second life among listeners who appreciate its restless energy. It marked the beginning of Hanson's long, self-directed career as an independent band rather than a passing craze. In the years that followed, the brothers would leave the major-label system entirely and build a sustainable career on their own terms, and this single now reads as the first clear sign of that resolve.

Press play and hear three brothers fighting to redefine themselves. The hunger in their voices is the whole story.

"This Time Around" — Hanson's singular moment on the 2000s charts.