For Howie Day, slow and steady have won the race. That's the way pop-music breakthroughs used to happen, when so-called "overnight successes" really took years of blood, sweat and back stories.

But in an era of here-today, gone-tonight new artists, the current popularity of Day's rich alt-pop ballad, "Collide," is something of note.

The single is No. 7 this week on the Radiowave Airplay Monitor's chart of adult hits. And it's landed Day, previously a virtual unknown, performance spots on virtually every major talk show in the country.

No one seems more surprised than Day himself. The tall, thin, small-town boy from Maine has spent the better part of the last 16 months promoting the acclaimed album from which "Collide" was culled, "Stop All the World Now."

"I think it was getting to that point where things were winding down and we were thinking of doing a new record. I think we'd be doing it now," Day recently told AP Television News.

Day's often-cited influences can be heard in "Collide": a little Jeff Buckley here, a lot of Dave Matthews there. What's fresh is how they're spun together by record producer Youth, whose lush, large and in-charge production resulted in smash hits for The Verve, Crowded House and Dido. It's a wall of sound built upon the simplest folk-rock foundation.

The lyrics to "Collide" have a similar duality:

"Even the best fall down sometime / Even the wrong words seem to rhyme / Out of the doubt that fills my mind / I somehow find you and I collide."

"A lot of people come up to me and say, 'Is that a love song or, like, a breakup song?'" said Day.

"I think, for me, it was a love song. I think a lot of people took it as a breakup song. For me, it was sort of like, you know, the realization that relationships aren't completely a walk in the park ... Maybe that was just me turning 23, realizing that for the first time."

Even at twentysomething, Howie Day is an old soul and one smart enough to savor success, even if it's come a little later than the marketers told him to expect.

"I think you set yourself a goal, and by the time you get there, you've already got a new one," he says.

So now what?

"I don't know what my goal is now. For me, it's really just about getting in there and making the album that you feel passionate about."