"Stranger Than Fiction" is a song by American punk rock

Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...

 band Bad Religion

Bad Religion

Bad Religion is a punk rock band that formed in Los Angeles in 1979. Their current line-up consists of Greg Graffin , Brett Gurewitz , Jay Bentley , Greg Hetson , Brian Baker and Brooks Wackerman . Gurewitz is also the founder of the label Epitaph Records, which has released almost all of the...

, featured on their 1994 album with the same title

Stranger than Fiction (Bad Religion album)

Stranger than Fiction is the eighth full-length studio album by Bad Religion, released in 1994...

. It was also the album's third single and is widely considered to be one of their best known songs.

More than a decade after its release, "Stranger Than Fiction" remains one of the band's concert staples. The live version also appears on their 2006 live DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 Live at the Palladium.

At a Bad Religion concert in 1996, frontman Greg Graffin

Greg Graffin

Gregory Walter Graffin, Ph.D. is an American punk rock musician, college professor, and author. He is most recognized as the lead vocalist and songwriter of the noted Los Angeles band Bad Religion, which he co-founded in 1979 and is the band's only constant member, even though it now features two...

 sang "I wanna know why Gurewitz cracked, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction", referring to then-former and now-current guitarist Brett Gurewitz

Brett Gurewitz

Brett W. Gurewitz , nicknamed Mr. Brett, is the guitarist and a songwriter of Bad Religion. He is also the owner of the music label Epitaph Records and sister-labels ANTI-, Burning Heart Records, Fat Possum Records, and Hellcat Records...

, as opposed to "I want to know why Hemingway cracked, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction".

Single release

There is a 10" one-sided picture disc promo with the crossbuster symbol of which Dragnet only released 1,000 copies (also has Individual). There's a promo CD single which explains that "the talents of BR have been acknowledged by several critically noted scribes, including British music watchdogs NME and Melody Maker, as well as Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

, Spin

Spin (magazine)

Spin is a music magazine founded in 1985 by publisher Bob Guccione Jr.-History:In its early years, the magazine was noted for its broad music coverage with an emphasis on college-oriented rock music and on the ongoing emergence of hip-hop. The magazine was eclectic and bold, if sometimes haphazard...

, the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

and Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

, Playboy and Village Voice among many others. (...) truly, nothing compares to the sheer power of BR live". It also has a sticker with a quotation from Charles M. Young: "true believer punks from L.A., Bad Religion have mastered its art form, creating defiant, burning music...".

The German single has "Leaders and Followers" (which appears as a bonus track on the Japanese version of the Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger than Fiction (Bad Religion album)

Stranger than Fiction is the eighth full-length studio album by Bad Religion, released in 1994...

album) and "Mediocrity", and all the European dates for the STF Tour (including a mistake; it says Zurich is in the Czech Republic).

Charts

Year	Single	Chart	Position
1994	"Stranger Than Fiction"	Modern Rock Tracks	28