The Knack recorded “My Sharona” 40 years ago today (April 5th) at Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale, California. The late Doug Fieger claimed he modeled its structure after the act of sex. Sex apparently sells, My Sharona topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks. It was The Knack’s debut single and such a huge hit that they were unlikely to ever top it — and never did. In a 2000 interview, their late frontman Doug Fieger said he had two templates when he wrote the song, one for its structure, the other for a particularly memorable embellishment.
In 2000, the late Doug Fieger of The Knack explained the goal of “My Sharona,” and his stuttering in it.
“The idea of the song is that it’s sex. You get the foreplay and then you get the build-up and then you get the orgasm and then you get the afterglow, which is the lead, and then you start again. Four minutes of sex. The band that, really, we modeled The Knack after was The Who. I wanted to do a song with a stutter in it like “My Generation” and so the ‘m-m-m-m-my’ came out of that.”
