But I digress…

Anyway, “Time of the Season” was on the original album. The “too late” aspect of that band is that the single was released (and took off) like, a year after they had broken up.

To further your point, the Shakira track is also the outlier among the stuff I listed, because “Hips Don’t Lie” wasn’t just a hit, it was by far the biggest hit from that album (and of Shakira’s career). “My Boo,” “Don’t Forget About Us,” etc. were all lesser, shorter-lived hits than their predecessors.

All that said, I guess it depends on whether one classifies the Shakira album as an out-and-out flop or just a conglomerate-worrying underperformer. The album was gold-plus when they decided to order up the Wyclef track. I agree with you, it was an album-saver, not a “victory lap,” but very broadly speaking it qualifies.

I’m guessing people who didn’t know about it until it showed up on their iTunes storefront.

Truthfully, I’ve always heard the album this way – love “Time of the Season” but it always stands out of the flow of the rest of the record, which has a thematic unity I don’t hear in that single.

@Butch Huskey: Good point about Plain White T’s, but they don’t really fit the trend of the last half-decade of intentional, premeditated re-releases of already-successful albums. “Hey There Delilah” was just an old-fashioned fluke hit that made the PWTs’ reissued album a hit in the first place; it’s not like it had been a hit before.