This week’s theme is “artists with honorifics,” meaning albums by artists whose name is preceded some prefix of courtesy or esteem, like Doctor or Mister. Lots of artists fit the bill here, but we tried to get creative with our selections.

#7 Welcome to the Real World by Mr. Mister (1985)

For a brief moment in 1985, Mr. Mister was arguably the most popular rock band in the world. Their “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie” both got to the top of the Hot 100 in a couple months. Those songs were both featured on Welcome to the Real World, the group’s album from the same year.

Welcome to the Real World is as 1980s as an album comes. You’ve got the big choruses powered by warm synths. You’ve got the sinewy melodies sung by stacked vocals. As John Davidson of Louder Sound noted in 2024, “This [album] is so mid-eighties I can see Molly Ringwald and the rest of the brat pack dancing in a bedroom in my mind’s eye.” If you’re into that, then Welcome to the Real World is for you. If not, then it will sound like a million other albums from this era. We fell into the latter camp.

#6 Need You Now by Lady A (2009)

When Lady Antebellum kicked off their career in 2006, their name’s Confederate imagery was liable to turn some heads, but it didn’t stir much controversy. That changed in 2020.

After George Floyd was killed, as scores of artists came under fire for anything that might be perceived as racist, Lady Antebellum’s name started causing problems. The trio quickly took to social media to make an announcement. They were shortening their name to Lady A:

We did not take into account the associations that weigh down this word [Antebellum] referring to the period of history before the Civil War, which includes slavery. We are deeply sorry for the hurt this has caused and for anyone who has felt unsafe, unseen or unvalued.

We’ve watched and listened more than ever over these last few weeks, and our hearts have been stirred with conviction, our eyes opened wide to the injustices, inequality and biases black women and men have always faced and continue to face every day. Now, blindspots we didn’t even know existed have been revealed.

Problem averted, right? Not exactly. Conservatives were angry at the group capitulating. “Gonna need you to take ‘lady’ out of your name too,” right-wing provocateur Dr. Sydney Watson replied to their post. “As a woman, I feel attacked and vilified … Please be more considerate, bigots.”

Liberals also found the change pointless. “Given that the world knows what that A stands for,” Paul Zollo began in American Songwriter, “to many this change does little more than add extra insult to this ongoing injury.” Things were only going to get worse.

An African-American singer named Lady A quickly came forward to note that she had been using that designation for decades. She told Rolling Stone, “It shouldn’t have taken George Floyd to die for them to realize that their name had a slave reference to it. It’s an opportunity for them to pretend they’re not racist or pretend this means something to them.”

After discussions came to a standstill, she said they had to either change their name or pay her $5 million. The band did not like those options. They soon filed a lawsuit because, as a longstanding nickname for the group, they owned the trademark for “Lady A.” Two years later, the parties finally reached an undisclosed settlement.

What does this have to do with Lady A[ntebellum]’s second album, Need You Now? Very little. But it is more interesting than this serviceable country record. Frankly, I can’t see myself returning to this record for anything other than the title track. I’m a sucker for male-female duet.

#5 Doctor Hook by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (1972)

When I was two tracks into Dr. Hook’s self-titled record, I had one thought: This is zany. Part of that zaniness is due to the vocals. First, you’ve got Dennis Locorriere, the more standard vocalist heard on tracks like “Sylvia’s Mother.” Then you’ve got Ray Sawyer, heard on tracks like “Marie Laveau,” that sounds more like a carnival barker.

The zaniness of that vocal interplay is only ratcheted up by the songs themselves. They were largely written by the author and songwriter Shel Silverstein. As is made clear by his most famous composition, “A Boy Named Sue,” Silverstein knew how to spin a wild yarn. Those yarns could come off as the rantings of a madman if interpreted by the wrong person. But Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show really sell the part though, bringing Silverstein’s characters to life as vividly as his books do.

#4 2001 by Dr. Dre (1999)

First, I’ll tell you what I liked about 2001, Dr. Dre’s album confusingly released in 1999. Given that it’s Dre, the beats are all compelling. “The Watcher” and “What’s the Difference” are interesting enough to back a 1960s pop song as they are a G-funk classic. Additionally, many of Dre’s collaborators are at the height of the powers. Snoop Dogg sounds menacing on “The Next Episode” Eminem is running circles around most of his contemporaries on “Forgot about Dre.” Nate Dogg, Kurupt, and Xzibit also all make compelling appearances.

Despite that, I didn’t love everything about this record. As I’ve complained with many other hip-hop records—even those that are classics—2001 is too long. Cut off five tracks (and all the skits) and you’d have a much leaner, more effective record. That runtime feels extra long because so many of these songs are just Dre and his cronies rapping about Dre still being the best. I get it. He’s “Still D.R.E.”, but some other topics would make the record more dynamic.

#3 Harlem Street Singer by Rev. Gary Davis (1963)

When I took singing lessons around the corner from my Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment, my teacher told me a funny story. Years before, he woke up one day to a powerful voice singing in the distance. He put on his clothes to follow the song. A short walk brought him to a street fair where a gospel choir was performing. He soon approached the leader asking how he could join. He wanted to learn how to sing like those folks. The choirmaster had one question: “Have you found Christ yet?”

My teacher had not found Christ. But that question highlighted the necessity of honest belief required to pull off certain styles of music. You could not, for example, pull off “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” if you did not have the convictions of Rev. Gary Davis.

Davis was a preacher and musician who spent decades before even being able to afford a place to live. By the time audiences and artists began to take notice, Davis was in his 60s. But we are lucky that people did take notice. And we are lucky that David felt convictions deep enough to continue despite the scant success. The small body of recordings that he left us are some of the most powerful you will ever hear. And to generate that power, he doesn’t need more than a guitar, his voice, and a whole lot of belief.

Luckily, the Rev. Gary Davis story ended up being a happy one. Even as the folk revival—the 1960s movement that brought Davis some notoriety—began to fade, Davis was making enough money to afford two houses. Much of that money came from Peter, Paul and Mary’s renamed rendition of “Samson and Delilah.” Though technically in the public domain, they listed Davis as the songwriter. No, he did not die rich. But Davis was more comfortable than he’d been in decades. The only reason that was possible was the conviction he sang with across Harlem Street Singer.

#2 In the Right Place by Dr. John (1973)

A friend of mine once told me that when she listened to Jimi Hendrix, she often didn’t even think of him as playing the guitar. The music flowed so freely from his instrument that it sounded like an extension of his body, something that he could naturally emote from. Dr. John kind of makes me feel the same way.

No, Dr. John is not Art Tatum. He is not as virtuosic on the piano as Hendrix is on the guitar. But Dr. John is a natural. On songs, like “Qualified” the music flows from his fingertips like they always knew what to do. And when his instrument is not taking centerstage, his voice is just as compelling. On “Right Place, Wrong Time” and “Same Old Same Old,” Dr. John’s raspy Louisiana howl is more than enough to hold your attention.

#1 Money Jungle by Duke Ellington (1963)

Most jazz classics that I listen to are consistent sonically and thematically. Like when you listen to Kind of Blue, the first song dictates much of what you are going to get for the rest of the record. The same goes for A Love Supreme. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I love those albums. But they are record-length explorations of an idea or a mood.

Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle is not like that. You’ve got low key melodies like “Solitude.” You’ve got bebop influenced moments, like the title track. You’ve also got internationally-inspired rhythms, like “Caravan” and “A Little Max (Parfait)”. Frankly, the album is a bit all over the place.

And I loved that. I loved how Ellington was able to cover so much sonic ground on this record. Part of the reason he was able to do this was because of who he was working with: double bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach. Mingus and Roach were over two decades younger than Ellington. Having come up in a different musical world, they were able to make a record more dynamic than if the Duke had just gotten the old big band back together.

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I was happy to oblige. Jeff Walker is a big deal. Over the last few decades, he’s turned a CD store he opened in Southern California into one of the world’s largest distributors of CDs, DVD, vinyl, and all things physical media. The company, now called Alliance Entertainment, trades on the Nasdaq and did over a billion dollars in revenue last year. Walker and I sat down over coffee to talk about what’s driving the vinyl revival, how he’s survived decades of tumultuous change in the entertainment industry, and why physical media just won’t go away.

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One of the big stories in music over the last decade has been the resurgence of physical media. First it was vinyl, but now CDs are surging too. What best explains this physical trend in an increasingly digital world?

Starting with vinyl, that was about the cool factor. As it progressed over the last 10 years, younger people started to get interested, and their parents said, “Oh, you’re interested in something I used to be interested in. We can connect on this.” I think that helped along the way. We also had Record Store Day, which was created 19 years ago and has been super successful. That started driving people into record stores, and the labels were making limited-edition vinyl for Record Store Day, which meant you had to go that day to buy it. You also see a lot of vinyl on social media now.

As it’s moved into CDs, you have some of the same concept. CDs are definitely a cheaper way to own a piece of your favorite artist. There’s also a smaller conversation about ownership: On digital platforms, you don’t own the music. Only about 5% of people really think about that, but those people say, “I’m paying for this, but I don’t own anything.” So, there’s a bit of “own your favorite things.”

Taylor Swift’s album last year is a good example. She sold 2 million vinyl records and a million CDs, and nobody had to buy it to listen to her music. Everybody has a digital platform. People bought it only because they’re a fan or they want to collect something from their favorite artist. There’s an overlay of fandom and collecting in music right now, as well as in video, trading cards, and all sorts of other things.

You don’t just deal in music. Have you seen similar surges across the other verticals you work in, like movies and games?

We’re heavy in the movie business. We’re also in gaming and collectibles, and we’re working our way into trading cards right now. The DVD business declined rapidly over the last 15 years, but we’re definitely starting to see it flatten out. In parts of our business, we’re seeing growth come back on DVD. I project that DVDs will start moving up, similar to CD,s in either 2027 or 2028.

Video really messed up distribution. You need a lot of different services to watch a wide range of stuff. It’s all fragmented. Music did better. Everything’s on Spotify and Apple Music, so you have one service and can listen to it all. With video, something comes off a streaming service and might be gone for a while as the studio figures out what they’re doing with it. So, there’s definitely a social media movement right now around having a collection.

We used to say we were a distribution company. Then I started saying we were an entertainment company. Now I’ve fully swung over to saying we sell collectibles. People have a vinyl collection. They have a CD collection. I have a DVD collection at home. We also sell Funko and all sorts of other collectibles. Ultimately, everything I’m selling is something people collect.

Do you work in sports at all? That seems like a big collectibles area.

We’re very limited in sports. We have a little bit, like Funko-type characters. But from an acquisition perspective, we could completely go into sports. It’s collectible and a licensed product. It fits exactly with what we already do. It’s just another direction.

Going back to vinyl, I’ve heard that when they survey young people who buy records, a large portion don’t even own a record player. It’s truly a collectible, something you put on the wall. Does your company care whether people actually listen?

It doesn’t matter. I’ve heard that number before, and it seems a little high. Maybe they buy one or two, but if they start buying a few more, they’re probably going to get a turntable. There are also a lot of people who buy two copies. They open one and keep one sealed. I’m not too worried about it.

You mentioned Taylor Swift moving millions of physical units. How dominated are these markets by the biggest pop stars in the world? Or do smaller artists do well in the physical market too?

In music, you have a lot of historic catalogs, and then you have new releases. On vinyl, you sell tons of Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, and Prince—all those evergreen titles. Those sell lots of units every year. Then you have a deeper catalog. We’re stocking 55,000 unique vinyl titles, brand new, in the warehouse right now. CD is well over 100,000. So it’s definitely a long tail too.

Your website says you have hundreds of thousands of items available. Is all of this a big exercise in supply chain management, or is any of it made to order?

It’s all supply chain management. We have a little division that does some manufacturing on demand, but it’s mostly ordered. We have almost 350,000 SKUs in stock and three times that many in our database. Stock quantities go from one or two units up to multiple pallets of a particular title. It’s all determined primarily by sales velocity, or how many we sell per week.

A few years ago, around COVID, when Adele’s album 30 was coming out, people were saying that one album was constricting the entire vinyl manufacturing industry. Do big artists still need so much production that it locks smaller artists out for a while, or is that not an issue anymore?

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Can Music Change the Way We Speak?

By Chris Dalla Riva

People often don’t believe when you tell them that the term “bucket list”—meaning a list of tasks that must be completed before death—was coined in The Bucket List, the 2007 Rob Reiner film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Yes, “kick the bucket,” a euphemism for dying, goes back hundreds of years. But it took a buddy comedy to turn that euphemism into a morbid itinerary.

The origin of the word “stan,” or an extremely dedicated (and sometimes problematic) fan, often gets similar reactions. That’s just a portmanteau of “super” and “fan” or “stalker” and “fan,” right? Maybe. But you’d have to ask Eminem to confirm. The term was coined in “Stan,” the murderous masterpiece heard on his sophomore record, The Marshall Mathers LP.

When I was doing press for my book last year, people would often have questions about the subtitle, “What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.” Understanding the first part of that subtitle was easy. The book had myriad examples of what numbers tell us about “the biggest hit songs.” But the what-they-reveal-about-us part was less clear.

I think the origin of “stan” is a good example of what I was trying to get at in the second part of that title. The fact that we turned a character from an Eminem song into a common noun and a verb, reveals that we needed a word to describe crazed fandom of the 21st century. Songs, in short, not only have the ability to shape the way we think and act, but can point us to deeper trends.

I spent the last week digging through dictionaries to try to understand other ways that music has reshaped language. Below are some of the most interesting examples that I came across.

Please note that most listed definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary. Additionally, the listed year is the first year the word was attested. It is possible that some of these circulated earlier before being documented.

That’s Certainly from a Song

As far as we know, these terms all originated in a specific song that you can go listen to right this very minute.

Grandfather clock (1876 - n. A weight-and-pendulum eight-day clock in a tall case)

Shockingly, the term “grandfather clock” comes from composer Henry Clay Work’s 1876 song “My Grandfather’s Clock”:

My grandfather’s clock
Was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor;
It was taller by half
Than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn
Of the day that he was born,
And was always his treasure and pride;
But it stopped short
Never to go again,
When the old man died.

Work was an ardent abolitionist, and much of his musical output was focused on the Union and its cause, like “Marching Through Georgia.” His earlier songs ended up being overshadowed by “My Grandfather’s Clock,” though. It was likely the best-selling song of the 1870s.

Jim Crow (1828 - n. The system of laws or practices which enforced segregation of black people in the Southern states of the United States until the mid 20th century)

The laws that enforced racial segregation across the Southern United States throughout the 19th and 20th century were called “Jim Crow laws.” The name for this system emerged from “Jump Jim Crow,” an 1828 song written by noted blackface performer Thomas D. Rice.

Jingoism (1878 - n. Aggressive or exaggerated patriotism; advocacy of war)

In response to the surrender of Plevna during the Russo-Turkish War, a British musical hall song written by G. W. Hunt began to circulate. The chorus went as such:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

“By Jingo” was likely a euphemism for “by Jesus” that had evolved centuries earlier. The use in Hunt’s song transformed it and its variants into the pugnaciously patriotic word we know today. It also transformed Hunt’s name. Later in life, he was known as Jingo Hunt.

Kumbaya (1990 - n. A state or spirit of harmonious unity)

“Kum ba yah,” or alternatively “Come by here,” was an African-American spiritual that likely traces back to the enslaved Gullah people in 19th century South Carolina. The song was of great interest to 20th century folklorists, who eventually recorded it. By the 1960s, it had become a touchstone in the folk revival, which is where its association with unity emerged. Now, the phrase “sing kumbaya” is often used sarcastically.

Material girl (1984 - n. A worldly or materialistic woman or girl)

The term “material girl” doesn’t get the same usage as “bucket list,” but I was equally surprised that it doesn’t predate the work of art it is most associated with. In this case, I’m talking about Madonna’s “Material Girl.” That song gave the phrase its accepted meaning.

Mullet (1994 - n. A hairstyle, worn esp. by men, in which the hair is cut short at the front and sides, and left long at the back)

The business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back hairstyle was coined in the Beastie Boys 1994 track “Mullet Head”:

#1 on the side and don’t touch the back
#6 on the top and don’t cut it wack, Jack
Mullet head

The song makes clear that the trio intended the term as an insult (i.e., “Never trusted, Mullet head”), thus likely connecting it to the older “mullet-head,” meaning a stupid person.

Pie in the Sky (1911 - n. An unrealistic prospect of future happiness)

In 1911, labor activist Joe Hill was angry that various Christian groups, like the Salvation Army, were more concerned with what would happen to the poor in the next life than their present material needs. Hill, also a songwriter, decided to take the melody of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” and write new lyrics:

You will eat bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

His dessert-centered turn-of-phrase in “The Preacher and the Slave” came to stand for promises that were often unlikely to be kept. Four years later, Hill was controversially executed over murder accusations. He was later immortalized in “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” a folk song that Bob Dylan would take inspiration from on his 1967 album cut, “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

Rosie the Riveter (1942 - n. A woman who took on a factory job during the Second World War)

The prototypical American woman on the home front was created by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in their 1942 song, “Rosie the Riveter”:

All the day long, whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history
Working for victory
Rosie, the riveter

Evans would eventually have a surprise hit in the rock era when Bobby Vinton got to number with his, “There! I’ve Said It Again.” “There! I’ve Said It Again” also has the honor of being the last number one hit before Beatlemania began.

Shoo-Fly (1867 - phr. A catchphrase … used as an exclamation of annoyance)

A minstrel song from the 1860s whose writers remain in dispute, “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me” birthed the exclamation of annoyance. These days the song is mostly sung by children.

Spam (1990 - n. Unsolicited and unwanted material distributed over the internet (esp. by email))

The computing slang was likely inspired by the 1970 Monty Python sketch where Spam is served in every dish at a restaurant accompanied by a song mostly composed of that single word. Two decades later, the endless canned meat in that sketch became the perfect word to describe the endless flow of crap into our email inboxes.

Vie en rose (1957 - n. A life seen through rose-colored spectacles)

“La Vie En Rose,” the signature song by French singer Édith Piaf, spawned the phrase capturing those with a romantic view of the world.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah (1945 - int. Expressing delight, excitement, elation, etc.)

The Oscar-winning song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” was initially written for the controversial Disney film, Song of the South. Though Disney historian Jim Korkis reports that the hyphenated word was coined by Walt Disney because of his enjoyment of other nonsense songs his company put out (e.g, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”), others think it was likely inspired by an earlier, racist folk song that was later reimagined as “Turkey in the Straw.” Some renditions of the racist version contain the Disney-esque refrain, “O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.”

Just as words evolve over time, it’s also interesting to see the same happen with songs. As noted, the melody of that racist song was reused in “Turkey in the Straw.” But it was also reused in another song, “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” That children’s song has been adapted by a few 21st century rappers. The most notable example is Jibbs’ 2006 top ten hit, “Chain Hang Low.”

When the Genre Comes from a Song

Entire genres occasionally take their name from a lyric in—or title of—a song that is an example of a new style of music.

Bossa nova (1960 - n. A style of Brazilian music related to samba)

Though the phrase likely goes back a bit further, it was immortalized in the João Gilberto recording of the Jobim-Mendonça cowrite “Desafinado”: “Que isto é bossa nova, que isto é muito natural.”

Hip-Hop (1979 - n. A genre of popular music originating among young African Americans in New York City in the late 1970s)

The term “hip-hop” was a common call-and-response phrase used by early rappers. Because of that, it is impossible to pinpoint who the first to say it was. But Melle Mel, one member Grandmaster Flash’s Furious Five, alleged in a 2002 interview that Keith Wiggins, an early MC that went by Cowboy, originated the term by making fun of someone in the audience while he was performing:

This kid named Kokomo was going to the army and Cowboy was messing with him—teasing him with the marching hip-hop rhythm: Hip, hop, hip, hop. He just took it on from there and kept going with it. It just took on a life of its own.

If you were not kicking it in the Bronx in the 1970s, you likely were first exposed to the term on The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” when Wonder Mike raps, “I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie / To the hip, hip-hop and you don’t stop the rockin'.”

Reggae (1968 - n. A style of popular music of Jamaican origin)

The name for the popular Jamaican style of music was popularized in “Do the Reggay,” a 1968 song by Toots and the Maytals. Toots noted that the term was based on slang describing a person who is unclean or unkempt.

Zydeco (1949 - n. A kind of uptempo syncopated music originating among Creole people in southern Louisiana)

The traditional French song “J’ai fait tout le tour du pays” contained the refrain “Les haricots sont pas salés.” The “les haricots” part of that phrase slowly morphed into the term “zydeco,” which then became used to describe the style of the song.

Not From a Song, but a Song Made It Known

Sometimes songs don’t create a word, but they do bring that word to a wider audience. These are words that belong in that group.

Bootylicious (1992 - adj. Esp. of a woman, often with reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy; shapely)

Though popularized by the Destiny’s Child song “Bootylicious,” the term circulated in years prior. Interestingly, the first musical use of the term was by Snoop Dogg on Dr. Dre’s “Fuck Wit Dre Day”: “Your bark was loud but your bite wasn’t vicious / And them rhymes you were kicking were quite bootylicious.” Snoop’s use of the word is not complimentary. In fact, he’s using it to mean bad, as in a variant of “your rhymes are ass.”

Even more interesting, when Snoop used the word again on his 2004 track “Step Yo Game Up,” he had adopted the more common post-Destiny’s Child usage: “‘Cause I’m tryin’ to find a bitch that’s bootylicious.”

Crunk (1995 - adj. Chiefly in the context of hip-hop: exciting or fun; (of a person) extremely energized or excited)

Often thought to be derived from “to crank up” or a combination of “crazy” and “drunk,” “crunk” emerged as African-American slang before being immortalized in various hip-hop songs. The first lyrical mention was in Outkast’s 1993 single, “Player’s Ball”: “I gots it crunk, if it ain’t real, ain’t right.” The term would soon be associated with the southern genre popularized by Three 6 Mafia and Lil Jon.

Def (1981 - adj. Excellent, outstanding; fashionable, ‘cool’.)

Though “Rapper’s Delight” did not coin the term “hip-hop,” it likely had a hand in the proliferation of “def.” Right after Big Bank Hank raps the immortal “Hotel, motel, a whatcha gonna do today?” he continues, “Cause I’ma get a fly girl, gonna get some spank, and drive off in a def OJ.” In this case, a “def OJ” refers to a luxury car.

What’s funny is that lyric is almost always misprinted. It was originally written as “Cause I’ma get a fly girl, gonna get some spank, and drive off in a death OJ.” The lyric is trying to capture the same thing. But Big Bank Hank’s pronunciation helped birth a new word.

Dipsy-doodle (1896 - n. Something with an unusual or irregular appearance or shape, or with many dips, curves, etc.)

Though it likely circulated earlier, the term was popularized by jazz musician Larry Clinton’s 1937 song “The Dipsy Doodle,” which was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Tommy Dorsey, and Bill Haley, among others. Interestingly, Clinton claimed to have adapted the term from “dipsy doo,” a nickname for New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell’s looping curveball.

Dixie (1859 - n. The southern United States)

Though using the term “dixie” as shorthand for the Confederacy or the Southern United States predates any musical usage, it was really Dan Emmett’s 1859 composition that cemented the association.

Dope (1986 - adj. Excellent, great, impressive)

Nearly all early usage of “dope” to mean “excellent” is traced to hip-hop songs. Allegedly, a 1981 recording of Jimmy Spicer’s “Money (Dollar Bill Y’All)” used the word, but the more widely circulated 1983 version does not.

That said, Salt-N-Pepa’s 1986 song “It’s Alright” does contain an early verifiable example: “Hurby the producer ain’t no joke / He always makes sure the beats are dope.” As with other terms like this, usage likely predates these recordings, but it was the recordings that brought them from African-American communities to the world.

Hooligan (1898 - n. A young street rough, a member of a street gang)

Though the origin is debated, the term gained prominence through the British music hall song “The O’Hooligan Boys,” which described a rowdy Irish family. Given that this was a British song stereotyping the Irish, the term was likely meant as an insult or a slur. It has lost that connotation.

Jitterbug (1933 - n. A jittery or nervous person)

Though the term predates a specific song, its proliferation is due to bandleader Cab Calloway. Calloway initially used the term to describe someone who, likely during Prohibition, drank alcohol made at home. His 1934 song “Jitter Bug” gave it its musical association.

Que sera sera (1593 - int. Expressing resignation or acceptance in response to the futility of trying to change (future) events)

Though it goes back centuries, the phrase was largely popularized by Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” a Livingston-Evans song written for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Valley girl (1982 - n. A teenage girl from San Fernando Valley in southern California)

The Valley Girl stock character and stereotype was popularized by Frank Zappa’s 1982 hit “Valley Girl,” which featured his daughter Moon Unit saying various catchphrases associated with young women of the San Fernando Valley, a place her father hated. The term was further cemented by being used as the title of an early Nicholas Cage movie in the following year.

Ya-yas (1970 - n. To get one’s ya-yas out and variants: to enjoy oneself uninhibitedly)

When The Rolling Stones titled their 1970 live record Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, they were quoting a similarly titled blues song by Blind Boy Fuller. But in Fuller’s day, “ya-yas” was slang for “ass” (i.e., “Now you have to leave my house this morning / Don’t I’ll throw your yas yas out the door”). By the time The Stones got hold of the word, they were using it to refer to hedonistic self-abandon. And that meaning has stuck, along with occasional usage to refer to women’s breasts, another Stonesian topic.

YOLO (1968 - int. ‘You only live once’; used to express the view that one should make the most of the present moment without worrying about the future)

Though the acronym can be traced back to 1968, Drake’s use of the term in “The Motto” brought it to public attention: “Now she want a photo, you already know, though / You only live once, that’s the motto, n*gga, YOLO.”

Maybe One Day …

These are some words that have begun to see more usage but most dictionaries do not think have met the standard to be included yet.

Ether (2001 - v. Insult or humiliate publicly)

During his beef with Jay-Z, Nas released a track in 2001 called “Ether” where he says that he will “Fuck with your soul like ether.” In more recent years, people have taken inspiration from the song and used its title as a verb. For example, a 2017 New York Magazine article noted, “But Mike Pence was largely left alone, until I saw the sign above. Mr. Vice-President, sir: You just got ethered.”

No Cap (2017 - n. The truth)

African-Americans have used the word “cap” as a verb meaning “to lie” or “to boast” for decades. The related nounal form, meaning “a lie,” has been around just as long. But there is more usage of “no cap” these days, meaning “the truth.” This usage, again originating in African-American communities, has proliferated online and received an added boost from 2010s hip-hop songs, like Future’s “No Cap”: “Yellow diamonds like banana, that’s cap / Put some dirt in Mello Yello, no cap”.

Brat (2024 - adj. Confident, messy, and hedonistic in an authentic way)

The word “brat” as in a “badly behaved child” has been around for centuries as a noun. With the release of her 2024 album brat, pop star Charli XCX tried to remake the word as an adjective. The meaning is a bit amorphous—I’ve seen everything from vodka to Kamala Harris described as brat—but it seems to signify some type of messy authenticity.

And One For the Road

This doesn’t fit any category exactly, but it has a fun musical component—and is now largely used in musical contexts—so I figured I’d include it.

Mondegreen (1954 - n. A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing)

“Mondegreen” is an interesting word because it describes itself. Sylvia Wright coined it as such in a 1954 Harper’s essay:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember: “Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.”

Wright had misheard her mother as she recited Percy’s ballad. The final line was not “And Lady Mondegreen” but “And laid him on the green.” Thus, a new word was born. And it’s a helpful one. From mishearing “Hold me closer, tiny dancer” as “Hold me closer, Tony Danza” and “Got a long list of ex-lovers” as “All the lonely Starbucks lovers,” the term is mostly applied to songs these days.

Thank you to Amanda Bettin for the OED access and for pointing me to some of these words.

A New One
"100 Years" by Ken De Poto
2026 - Folk

If you’re a regular here, you are familiar with Ken De Poto. He’s the other participant in my exceedingly ridiculous album-a-day challenge. But Ken is not just a sidekick in a year-long quest. He’s a seriously talented musician. And he just put out a new record for the first time in a long time.

My favorite track on the record is the acoustic ballad “100 Years.” Do I wish he invented some word in this song, so that I could better tie it to the topic of this newsletter? I guess. But his use of everyday language is part of what makes this song hit luck a punch to the gut.

An Old One
"Enter Maurice" by Steve Miller Band
1972 - Rock

If you are particular type of person, your first question after reading this piece might have been, “What about POMPATUS?” Pompatus is a “word” that Steve Miller invented for his classic “The Joker” (i.e., “Cause I speak of the pompatus of love”). And I put the word “word” in quotes because “pompatus” is really a nonce word, meaning that it was created for a single use. In fact, Miller created the word by mishearing another nonce word, namely “puppetutes,” in The Medallions 1954 song “The Letter.”

But I guess pompatus was used more than once. Along with “The Joker,” Miller put his accidental creation to use in both “Enter Maurice” and “The Conversation.” Because I’m sure you’ve heard “The Joker,” today I’m sending the goofy “Enter Maurice” your way.

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This week’s theme is “not that guy,” meaning albums by artists that share a name with a much more famous artist. Let me give you an example: Nirvana. Of course, the name is associated with the grunge legends. But the Seattle trio was predated by a 1960s group of the same name. We’re listening to those other artists today. (Shout out to friend of the newsletter for suggesting this topic.)

#7 Oasis by Oasis (1973 - Compare to Britpop legends Oasis)

In the early 1970s, David Crosby recommended Atlantic Records sign a buzzy psychedelic folk group from the Bay Area. The label’s legendary founder Ahmet Ertegun offered them a contract. The soon-to-be legendary David Geffen took them on as a client. An album was quickly produced but shelved. Though most of the group disbanded, two members forged forth and recorded a self-titled electric record. It is horrendous.

We’ve heard a lot of bad records this year. But the badness of Oasis is special. It was bad in a way that made me feel like I needed to throw up. Maybe the best illustration of this is the yeah-yeah-yeahs that open “We are People.” It’s like the vocal is actively fighting against the rhythm guitar.

#6 Gets On by Rhianna (2002 - Compare to Barbadian pop star Rihanna)

In 2002, the aspiring British pop star Rhianna Elizabeth Kenny released an album under her first name. That album, Get On, sounds exactly like an album by an aspiring pop star from that era. The programmed percussion is very dry. The verses are short and punchy. The choruses try to soar as high as they can. The record’s only fault is that it’s got too much fluff. It would have been a better EP.

If things went differently—maybe Rhianna got paired up with better writers and producers—she might have been a star. But there was a problem. A few years later, a charismatic Barbadian of the same name released her debut single, “Pon de Replay.” When “SOS” came out the year after, no one else was going to be able to use the name Rihanna, independent of spelling.

The British Rhianna never really released much more music. And she was cursed by bad name selection. In 2010, she founded a duo name Little Fix, only a few years before the girl group Little Mix would take over the British charts. Sometimes the universe is working against you.

#5 Something Special for Young Lovers by The Ray Charles Singers (1964 - Compare to piano-playing Ray Charles)

Not long before my ex-girlfriend and I broke up, her father gave me a stack of 78s that belonged to his father. Buried in that stack was a Ray Charles record. I was excited to put it on my turntable. But that excitement quickly disappeared. This was not the Ray Charles I was expecting. In fact, this Ray Charles was White.

Charles Raymond Offenberg, who later swapped his first and middle names, got his start in the music business before the legendary Ray Charles. And for sharing his name with such a generational artist, he carved out a nice career for himself.

• He was a sought after vocal arranger, known for his collaborations with Perry Como

• He sang the theme song to Three’s Company

• He spent decades as a consultant for the Kennedy Center

• He wrote the elementary school choral anthem “Fifty Nifty United States”

Charles also released some popular recordings, scoring six hits on the Hot 100. His Something Special for Young Lovers got to number 11 and spawned “Love Me With All Your Heart,” a song that peaked at number three behind The Dixie Cups’ “Chapel Of Love” and Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love.”

Something Special for Young Lovers is one of the most uncool records I’ve ever heard. It’s something you’d hear whispering in the background at your grandparents’ house. But the arrangements, especially on “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” are vivacious for easy listening. Something Special for Young Lovers is also an interesting time capsule because it is filled with covers popular in 1963 and 1964, none of which are by The Beatles. I guess this Ray Charles wasn’t a Beatlemaniac.

#4 The Warrior by Scandal and Patty Smyth (1984 - Compare to punk poet )

After David Lee Roth ditched Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen asked Patty Smyth if she wanted to front his band. Smyth, pregnant at the time, declined the offer. But I think she would have made a great frontwoman for the 1980s hitmakers. “The Warrior,” cowritten by Holly Knight, is evidence of that. It’s a powerful vocal over a thumping riff.

“The Warrior” comes from an album with the identical name. It’s a serviceable rock record. The problem is most of the other tracks are trying and failing to capture the energy of the title track. Having the Van Halen brothers behind some of those tracks might have been beneficial.

#3 The Album by The Firm (1997 - Compare to rock supergroup The Firm)

After the Jonas Brothers released their 2023 album called The Album, friend of the newsletter ranked every (notable) album called The Album for Vulture. Schonfeld rightly placed The Firm’s The Album at number three. His description was exquisite:

Has any high-profile rap supergroup been memory-holed faster than the Firm, the mid-’90s grouping of Nas, Foxy Brown, AZ, and Cormega? (Sit back down, Kids See Ghosts.) On their first and only album, the highs are high, and Foxy Brown injects some saucy bravado into the titillating “Fuck Somebody Else,” even if Nas seems to be on autopilot following the one-two punch of Illmatic and It Was Written. As on the best mafioso rap albums, the production is wound tight and funky, with Dr. Dre behind the boards.

The Firm’s The Album is a decent album, especially as far as supergroups go. Its fun, mafioso concept almost feels cinematic. But given the complaints the involved parties had with the making of the record, it’s not a surprise that it is also a bit disjointed.

#2 Mission Impossible by James Taylor Quartet (1987 - Compare to singer-songwriter James Taylor)

I often turn heads when I tell people that I don’t like the singer-songwriter James Taylor. Sure, he has written some nice songs (e.g., “Carolina on My Mind”). And his fingerstyle guitar work is worth studying (e.g., “Millworker”). But his voice is so plain that it leaves me wanting more. (I have a similar issue with John Mayer.) The James Taylor Quartet, by contrast, did not leave me wanting more.

For nearly every artist in today’s newsletter, the artist I am writing about started their career before the more famous artist of the same name. That’s not the case here. The singer-songwriter James Taylor had already reached the peak of his fame when the James Taylor Quartet put out their first album. And that album couldn’t be more different than something by the singer-songwriter. It’s jazzy. It’s funky. It’s all instrumental. And nothing has ever made me feel cooler.

#1 How Glad I Am by Nancy Wilson (1964 - Compare to Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson)

I was a bit thrown off when I turned on Nancy Wilson’s How Glad I Am. Wilson’s vocals on the opening number are beyond precise, as if she were a singing metronome. But I’m glad I didn’t form my opinion after those opening lines. Wilson has a dynamic voice—one that can handle jazz, pop, and soul with ease. You get all of that on How Glad I Am.

“The Grass is Greener” moves with verve. “West Coast Blues” has more personality than almost anything else from the 1960s. “The Show Goes On” plods along with a slow burn. On this record, Wilson is in complete control but also dynamic.

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Recent Album a Day Themes: 1977 • The Song is the Album is the Artist • Murdered Musicians • Random Rolling Stone • American Idol Disappointments • Butt Rock • Q but No Queens • 1990s Hip-Hop • Trading Favorites • Concept Records • Peaked at 200 • Alliterative Artists • Hip-Hop Groups

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But a year later, I have finally heeded Walt’s advice. I not only picked up a copy of DeVille’s incredible book but got him to sit down with me to talk about it for an hour. My favorite thing about this book was how much wider the scope was than I was expecting. Yes, you get the inside scoop on all your favorite indie rock of the last 25 years from a genuine expert. But you also get to understand how these indie artists came to impact the mainstream in both big and small ways. If you enjoy our conversation, I implore you to pick up a copy of DeVille’s book.

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There’s often a narrative that popular culture, and especially music, has stagnated. I won’t claim that the changes over the last 25 years have been as radical as those between, say, 1955 and 1980. But your book tracks some pretty significant shifts in popular music over the last few decades. Do you agree that music has kept evolving?

I do, especially in terms of pop music. I think about what’s happening in popular music almost like an Overton window. The way we define pop music is based on what’s getting played on the radio, what’s going up the charts, or what’s in the zeitgeist. The content of that has changed a lot. There’s always turnover and new trends coming in. Think about the DJ Mustard–style production that was everywhere around 2013 and 2014. You don’t really hear that now.

The genres themselves have also evolved a lot, partly from merging together and influencing each other. Country music is pretty dominant on the pop charts right now, and you hear a lot of hip-hop and classic rock influence in it. If anything is stagnant, it’s the distribution of new music. The way new hits and new stars get made feels really stagnant. But the evolution of the music itself is still happening, and it definitely happened within indie rock, which was the subject of my book.

Given the title, I naturally expected a 21st century indie rock history from your book. But it encompasses so many other styles and sounds. I was not expecting to read so much about Kanye West, for example. Did you know the book would be this expansive when you set out to write it?

Yes. My original subtitle for the book was “How Indie Rock Went Pop,” and I meant that in a few different senses. I meant it in the sense of indie blowing up and having more of a mainstream presence. But I also meant it in the sense of indie morphing into a kind of pop music. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the trends were moving in a poptimist direction. Many indie bands were moving away from the guitar-rock band formation toward synths, hip-hop, R&B, and mysterious electronic music. It felt like the zeitgeist was anything except rock.

I joined the staff of Stereogum in 2013, but before that I was just an observer of the indie media sphere. I saw Pitchfork, Stereogum, and the rest moving toward a celebration of big pop stars. It became very cool within the indie realm to be into Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé. Your average Joe who wasn’t tapped into trendy music probably had no idea. So, I wanted to write a book that showed how indie rock interacted with mainstream pop culture.

That was part of the selling point for the publisher. There are so many entry points. The target audience is probably a religious Pitchfork reader from the last 20 to 25 years, but you don’t have to be that person to get into the book. If you remember American Apparel or Garden State or MySpace or the rise of the iPod and those iPod ads, there’s something here for you. My hope was to write a book that anyone who lived through those years could relate to in some way, and I feel like I achieved that to some extent.

A lot of those cultural moments are vivid memories for me, but some were just before my time. I had no idea how important The O.C. was in bringing indie rock to a wider audience.

In 2003, I was a fairly new listener compared to the OGs who’d been into indie rock since the 1980s and 1990s, but I felt like a veteran at the time. Then all of a sudden there’s this hit primetime soap opera where one of the main characters is name-checking Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins, and Bright Eyes all the time. It was like the meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV, even though it predates that meme. It really felt like a big deal.

In the book, I quote Britt Daniel from Spoon saying that, more than anything else, he hears from people that they discovered Spoon through The O.C. I think it turned on a lot of listeners who didn’t previously have a pathway into underground rock music. It created that pathway, even if it was mostly serving up the poppiest, most accessible version of it.

A lot of this story is told through how Pitchfork shaped the discourse around indie rock for well over a decade. You even include album scores in the book. Is it possible to overstate Pitchfork’s influence on this scene?

Its influence was pretty large. It’s probably possible to overstate it in the sense that I’m largely writing from my own perspective. I was loading up Pitchfork every day and reading the reviews for 15 years or so. It was extremely influential on me and was my personal entry point into a lot of this music. But I’m not a unique story. When you read quotes from people talking about how a positive review basically gave them a career or a negative review destroyed their career, the influence was profound.

Then there was the festival. Anything that could get booked at Pitchfork Music Festival felt like it fell under the indie umbrella, even if it had nothing to do with indie music. Kendrick Lamar performed at Pitchfork Music Festival. Nobody would call him an indie rock artist, but he was part of the assortment of artists your typical indie listener was almost certainly into. Pitchfork wasn’t the only publication contributing to that broadening of horizons, but it played a huge role.

Maybe I could have cited them a little less often in the book. Somebody pointed out early on how many times I referenced them. But Pitchfork was the baseline for my understanding of this culture, and especially of its expansion to a broader audience.

Pitchfork’s own journey—from an independent publication run by one guy out of a basement to being part of Condé Nast—feels like a meta illustration of the music it covered expanding into the mainstream.

That’s a fair point. Pitchfork’s own journey kind of mirrors the journey a lot of the music took.

Since Pitchfork’s early days were before my time, it’s hard for me to fathom that one bad review could sink a career. The quintessential example is Travis Morrison’s Travistan. He’s basically said that review destroyed his solo career.

It really was the case. That was 2004, and Pitchfork was really picking up steam. But Travistan is a unique example. Travis Morrison was coming from The Dismemberment Plan, a band Pitchfork had heartily endorsed. They were one of Pitchfork’s flag-plant bands. When an institution that’s been giving you a significant boost turns on you, you’re in a uniquely vulnerable position.

I’m the biggest Dismemberment Plan fan you’ll find, so I’m not saying Pitchfork made them. But I think they would acknowledge the role Pitchfork played in bringing their music to a broader audience. They were extra dependent on the indie media sphere that Pitchfork was at the center of.

One of my favorite passages comes about two-thirds of the way through the book:

In terms of subjective cultural impact, indie rock wasn’t quite grunge or nu metal. It was difficult for rock, even increasingly poppy rock, to have that kind of sustained reach at a time when MTV was no longer a taste-making behemoth, putting the rockers and the pop stars in the same programming blocks.

How much of the success of earlier waves of alternative music came down to tastemakers like MTV putting it right next to what was popular?

Read more

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A Song for Every Place

By Chris Dalla Riva

Data is usually boring. Controversial? Probably not. But I feel like I have the right to make that claim given that I write a newsletter about music and data. My right is only reaffirmed by both of my parents being accountants. I come from a long line of spreadsheet aficionados. When you spend so much of your life digging through grids of digital cells, you come to learn that 99% of the population would like to avoid that activity at all costs.

But there are people here. Each week, this newsletter—billed as “the intersection of music and data”—goes out to over 10,000 readers. On social media, my posts on similar topics have millions of views. People, it seems, like what they can glean from data even if the data itself is not that inspiring.

Because of that, I’ve always wanted to give people more ways to play with the datasets that I generate in my work. Sure, I could just post some spreadsheets. I’ve done that in the past. But almost nobody clicks on them. I’d rather give people a more interactive way to experience that data. Today, my dreams are coming true.

A few weeks ago, I worked on a fun piece called “No One Sings About Kalamazoo Anymore.” That involved building a dataset of hit songs that mentioned places in their titles in order to answer two questions:

1. Do we sing about places less frequently these days?

2. Among the places we do sing about today, are they more likely to be large population centers than in years past?

After I answered those questions, I kept thinking about how it would be fun to explore a map of all the songs. I had a few visuals in the piece, one of which I’ve displayed below, but I wanted something more interactive. Now, I have it. And I wanted to share it with you.

A Searchable, Scrollable Map of Songs

Before discussing some insights I’ve gained from aggregating this data, I first wanted to give you an overview of the tool. If you’re too cool for demos, you can click here to give it a try right now. For everyone else, here’s how it works.

View the Map

You can navigate this map in two ways: scrolling and searching. Scrolling is similar to how you might explore a map on your phone. As you move left, right, in, and out, more songs will reveal themselves.

Let’s say that I’m from Spain. I can zoom into the Iberian Peninsula on the map and see scores of songs appear. By clicking any of the bubbles, the names of the songs will display, along with some basic information, like who performed it and when it was released (e.g., “The Bilbao Song” by Andy Williams).

You can also find things by searching. And this search bar is very robust. You can search through artists, places, titles, and basically any other piece of metadata that I’ve attached to the song.

In the image below, I’ve searched for “Frank Sinatra.” The map then centers to include every song in the database performed by Sinatra. You’ve got “Chicago.” You’ve got “Theme from New York, New York” and “Autumn in New York.” You’ve even got the obscure “French Foreign Legion.”

This search tool is also packed with filters. Do you want to see only songs that mention cities? Click the filter. Do you only want cities mentioned by nickname? Again, you can click the filter. Other filters allow you to limit based on when the song was released and why I’ve included it.

This last part is important. I don’t have every song. In fact, I’m only looking for songs that mention places in their titles. But even with that clarification, getting everything would be impossible. There are hundreds of thousands of songs released daily.

I wanted these songs to have some level of notability. So, I scanned pop charts going back to 1940, discographies of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, various critical lists of great songs, and a few other sources. Again, you can filter just to a specific source.

The thing I am most proud of is that you can hear any song with a click. Every song title is linked. Not only that, but you can pick your streaming service of choice, so that it brings you to where you can actually listen.

As an example, I am from New Jersey. If I search “New Jersey” and select “Spotify,” then anytime I click a song title, it will bring me to that song on Spotify. Makes it easy to listen to songs I’m unfamiliar with, like “Jersey” by Future and “Jackson” by Cymbals Eat Guitars.

I know that when you head to this map, you will eventually search for a song or a place and find nothing. Again, I wanted songs that mentioned a place in their title and were notable in some way. But I do consider something to be “notable” if you feel compelled to tell me about. In other words, user submissions are welcomed. Just click the button on the site and tell me what I’m missing.

So, What Places are We Singing About?

This is the music and data newsletter. So, I might as well give you some insights before you take your personal tour through the map.

First, what years are the songs from? Given the last piece I wrote on this topic, it’s no shock that 61% of songs in the database were released before 1990. The conclusions don’t match exactly because (a) we expanded our search beyond hit songs and (b) we don’t have a base rate to compare to (i.e., there were fewer songs released in the 1940s than today).

Given the preponderance of older songs in our data, it’s no shock that nearly all of the most represented artists are dead. Sufjan Stevens is the only living artist in the top ten, mostly because he’s released albums dedicated to Michigan and Illinois, respectively.

When people sing about places, they are mostly focusing on specific towns or cities. Nearly half of our database are songs of that type. The next closest is songs about countries at 19.7%. Water and natural features round out the bottom at 3.8%.

Since cities are the types of places we spend most time writing about, we might as well enumerate the top cities. It’s no surprise that New York City has a comfortable lead at number one. We’ve been singing about it non-stop for a century.

Most of the other places in the top ten aren’t a big shock either. They are large population centers. And the places that no longer rank among the largest cities in a country, like Detroit, used to be. As I noted in my other piece, we still sing about small places, but the largest continue to command much of our attention.

I could go on, but the point of this piece is the interactiveness of the data. I hope you enjoy clicking around. Ideally, you’ll unearth a long lost song about the place you’re from or a place you love.

View the Map

A New One
"Willowbrook Mall" by Max Rauch
2026 - Pop Punk

How many songs can you write about New York City and Los Angeles? The answer is at least hundreds. But in the course of building my song map, I became more interested in the compositions that were smaller, like songs about surfing off the coast of Canada or celebrating Christmas on an aptly named Indian Ocean island.

In his recent single, Max Rauch took a big sound to a very small topic: the Willowbrook Mall. That titular shopping mall is very close to where I grew up, thus giving the song a special appeal. But Rauch’s melodies are strong enough to hold your attention even if you’ve never come within one hundred miles of the New Jersey shopping center.

An Old One
"Fall in Philadelphia" by Daryl Hall & John Oates
1972 - Soul

Before releasing their debut album Whole Oates, the future superstars Daryl Hall and John Oates had been kicking around some demos. Frankly, I find some of those demos more enjoyable than their final studio takes. “Fall in Philadelphia” is a good example of this. The studio take is just a bit too slow and polished. The demo has a looseness that really allows the vocal harmonies from the Philadelphia duo to shine.

Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Along with getting access to our entire archive, subscribers unlock biweekly interviews with people driving the music industry, monthly round-ups of the most important stories in music, and priority when submitting questions for our mailbag. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief • Vinyl Specialist • Spotify’s Former Data Guru • Hall of Fame Songwriter• John Legend Collaborator • Broadway Arranger • Indie Label Founder• Fender Exec

Recent Newsletters: Two-Hit Wonders • The Lostwave Story • Forgotten Artists • Album Cover Colors • Bad Ways to Die • A Frank Sinatra Mystery • Slop Problems

Want more from Chris Dalla Riva? Get a copy of his book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves wherever books are sold.

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This week’s theme is “1977,” meaning albums released in 1977. Why 1977? Because Ken said whenever he hears an old album that he likes, there’s a 99% that it was released in 1977. We decided to put his observation to test.

#7 Love You by The Beach Boys (April 11)

Beach Boys aficionado first told me about The Beach Boys’ Love You a year or so ago. When I saw it was released in 1977, I immediately threw it on my short list. And I was excited when I picked it. I’d heard it variously described as early new wave and proto-punk. The Beach Boys making a punk record? Sign me up. I could not have been more disappointed.

Musically, there are some things to like on Love You. “Good Time” is harmonically rich. “Honkin' Down the Highway” sounds like it could please a 2010s hipster. And “The Night Was So Young” has that classic Beach Boys’ sense of longing so perfectly captured on earlier classics, like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Let’s Go Away for a While.” None of that matters, though. The lyrics on this album stink.

I never thought an album could be ruined by lyrics, especially since I like many a silly song. But from the nonsensical “Ding Dang” to the celestial ode “Solar System,” I felt like I was listening to a children’s album. Looking back, it was almost a breath of fresh air to hear a song about late night television legend Johnny Carson. I now understand why Brian Wilson tapped outside lyricists on earlier albums.

#6 Death of a Ladies' Man by Leonard Cohen (November 13)

As with any Leonard Cohen album, the lyrics on Death of Ladies' Man are as vivid as you’ll find in the popular music canon (e.g., “As the mist leaves no scar / On the dark green hill / So my body leaves no scar / On you and never will”). This record stands out for two reasons, though.

First, those lyrics are pretty horny. No, Cohen’s music is not sexless (e.g., “Chelsea Hotel #2”). But from propositioned orgies to listening to lovers through hotel walls, he seems to have ratcheted things up here.

Second, the production is a bit strange. The snare echoes on “Iodine” sound like it’s 1986. Of course, it’s not 1986. And the disco-inspired beat on “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” makes sure you know that. But further confusion arrives with the country pastiche of “Fingerprints.” These weird production decisions are mostly tied to one man: Phil Spector.

Spector, as noted in my previous review of The Ronettes sole record, was both a genius and lunatic. More of the latter than the former was on display in the making of Death of a Ladies' Man. Cohen described the studio as packed with guns, liquor, and heavily-armed bodyguards. When Spector absconded with the tapes before Cohen could complete his vocals, the singer-songwriter was caught between a rock and hard place. As Cohen noted in a 2010 biography, “I had the option of hiring my own private army and fighting it out with him on Sunset Boulevard or letting it go … I let it go.”

So, no this isn’t a perfect record. But it does have some nice moments. “Memories” is a particular highlight. By the end—and I mean this as a compliment—Cohen sounds like he’s trying to capture the intensity of the best Neil Diamond vocal.

#5 Aja by Steely Dan (September 23)

The biggest disagreement that Ken and I had this week was over Aja. Despite not being a huge Steely Dan fan, I enjoyed the duo’s palatable combination of pop, rock, and jazz. Ken found most of the record “masturbatory without being interesting,” though.

I could see why he felt like that. The back-to-back “Aja” and “Deacon Blues” could be a little tedious with their seven-minute runtimes. The crisp tones on “Black Cow” and “I Got the News” were arguably staid to the point of lifeless.

But I could only see those things. I didn’t actually believe them. As noted, Aja toes the line between many styles that were bubbling on the charts in 1977. Steely Dan’s ability to pull enjoyable compositions from those styles is worth celebrating, especially when they can do it to a danceable rhythm, like on “Peg.”

#4 Bad Reputation by Thin Lizzy (September 2)

I often make the case that Thin Lizzy and Faces are the two most underrated bands in the classic rock canon. We can talk Faces another day, but Thin Lizzy’s Bad Reputation gets at why I feel this way.

The title track’s searing riff and harmonized guitar solos toe but never cross the line where they’d become too self-important for my tastes. Phil Lynott’s vocals on tracks like “Southbound” and “Killer Without a Cause” are also the perfect balance of gruff and melodious.

Thin Lizzy also stands apart because they had some pop sensibilities. “Dancing in the Moonlight” is a great example of that. Its subtle storytelling and memorable chorus illustrates the duality of the group. They could rock. But they could also write songs strong enough that your mom might be caught singing along.

#3 Lust for Life by Iggy Pop (August 29)

Given that I’ve never been that into Iggy Pop or The Stooges, I was surprised how much I enjoyed Lust for Life. The title track and “The Passenger” had simple yet evocative guitar work. “Success” and “Some Weird Sin” even had some compelling melodies. What was going on? Did I have Iggy Pop all wrong? Maybe. But my taste for this record probably had more to do with David Bowie.

David Bowie and Iggy Pop had some fruitful collaborations throughout the 1970s while living in Europe. Lust for Life was not only produced by Bowie, but it saw him write the music for six of the nine tracks. Given how much I enjoyed Bowie’s "Heroes" (see below), it’s no shock that I also enjoyed an album he produced just a few months before.

So, do I like Iggy Pop? I guess I’m still not sure. I’ll have to dive deeper into his discography to find out. But I do like David Bowie. And like what he did with Iggy Pop on Lust for Life. I’m also thankful for this collaboration because it inspired maybe the greatest tweet in internet history.

#2 Little Criminals by Randy Newman (September 23)

Little Criminals is surely overshadowed by “Short People,” Randy Newman’s satirical smash hit that left many listeners angry, confused, or in stitches. This reaction is standard for pre-Pixar Newman. His sardonic wit is so unique in the universe of popular music that most people don’t know what to make of it.

It would be nice if most people could get past “Short People,” though. Frankly, it doesn’t even fits this record that well. It’s much peppier than everything outside of the title track. The rest of album journeys between gut-wrenching dirges (e.g., “Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father”), strange scenarios (e.g., “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America”), and vivid social criticism (e.g., “Baltimore”). I like “Short People,” but don’t let it distract you from what else is going on across Little Criminals.

#1 “Heroes” by David Bowie (October 14)

Structurally, "Heroes" is the most unique record we heard this week. The first half is grade-A rock music. You’ve got big riffs on songs like “Joe the Lion.” You’ve got propulsive rhythms on stuff like “Beauty and the Beast.” And, of course, you’ve got inspired vocals like on the title track.

The second half of this record lives in a different universe, though. It’s all instrumentals. While there is diversity among those instrumentals (e.g., “V-2 Schneider” rocks, “Sense of Doubt” does not), I would generally describe them as atmospheric.

I like that "Heroes" explores these two worlds. And I like that they are so clearly divided. It gives the record some Jekyll-and-Hyde mystery. The only downside is that the album’s closer, “The Secret Life of Arabia,” eschews that structure. It’s a decidedly non-instrumental piece that would have fit better on Side One. Alas, I’ll forgive you, David Bowie. The rest of your record is too good.

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It’s Not All About You

By Chris Dalla Riva

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Edgar Allan Poe and Ludwig van Beethoven. It’s for a larger project that I’m considering. But the most interesting thing I’ve come across in my research has nothing to do with my (secret) motivating question. It’s how we talk about these two 19th century giants.

You cannot read the alcohol-fueled tales of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” without hearing about Poe’s struggles with drink. Likewise, no analysis of the sickly women in “Ligeia” and “Berenice” would be complete without knowing that Poe’s young wife died of tuberculosis.

Learning of Beethoven’s work is much the same. The intensity of his Third Symphony—often denoted the Eroica—is always paired with a discussion of the Heiligenstadt Testament, a despairing letter Beethoven wrote about his struggles with deafness just before completing the composition. His “Für Elise”—maybe the most famous solo piano piece in history—also holds some mystery because scholars debate who inspired it.

Although these details are interesting, my general interest is not tied to their specifics. My interest is tied to the fact that the respective artistic outputs of Edgar Allan Poe and Ludwig van Beethoven are always discussed in relation to their lives. Something happened to the American writer or the German composer, and art flowed from each of them.

On the surface, I would understand if you didn’t find this that interesting. It’s the standard way we talk about art. In a recent review of an expanded Taylor Swift album, for example, Pitchfork noted how the song “Cleveland!” is a “love song about Swift’s new husband Travis Kelce that is wholly fixated on [her] own antagonists.” Examples outside of music are just as easy to come by:

• From Wheatfield with Crows to The Starry Night, most things Van Gogh painted are discussed in relation to his deteriorating mental health.

• Martin Scorsese’s filmography is often interpreted through his deep, sometimes strained relationship with Catholicism.

• No conversation about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction is finished until you discuss his tumultuous marriage to Zelda.

Despite the ubiquity of this interpretive approach, it is historically strange. Take The Odyssey as an example. When you read about the Greek epic, you will seldom find someone thinking about how it reflects Homer’s life. How it reflects some universal truth? Sure. How it reflects Greek society? That works too. Homer—should he even exist—sits in the background.

So, when and why did this shift happen? And will we ever get back to a world where we can understand a song by Drake without needing a working knowledge of his life story? To understand, we have to go back to the time that Beethoven and Poe were doing their most famous work.

The Mirror and the Lamp

When William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the second edition of their Lyrical Ballads in 1800, Wordsworth included a brief preface that would come to reshape art:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.

The key part of this passage is Wordsworth describing poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” When you combine that idea with his notion mentioned elsewhere in the preface that poetry should capture “common life” in “near to the real language of men,” you arrive at a novel way to understand art.

This is romanticism. And it has cast a long shadow. It is the environment that Poe and Beethoven came of age in. And it is the lens through which we continue to understand art.

In his 1953 book The Mirror and the Lamp, influential literary critic M. H. Abrams tried to understand this shift in perspective using his titular metaphor. “The mirror” is the old way of thinking about art. The author is reflecting the real world. “The lamp” is the romantic world birthed in the 1800s and still living today. The author is spilling their soul to light the way.

Throughout his work, Abrams discusses four major ways we have come to interpret art:

• Mimetic: Analyzes art by how it reflects the world (e.g., Chuck D. of Public Enemy arguing, “Rap music is the invisible TV station that black America never had.”)

• Pragmatic: Analyzes art by how it impacts the audience (e.g., Nile Rodgers of Chic noting, “If people aren’t dancing, we’re not doing our job right.”)

• Expressive: Analyzes art by how it reflects the artist (e.g., Joni Mitchell claiming, “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals … I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend, in my life, to be strong or to be happy.”)

• Objective: Analyzes art by what it reflects internally independent of the artist’s intent (e.g., any artist who refuses to explain their work and let it stand on its own)

To be clear, these are critical perspectives that you can use to understand a work of art. And I would argue that our current discourse largely lives between the Pragmatic and Expressive. But these ideas have deeply shifted how artists think about their own work too. And sometimes that shift can cause problems.

When the Expressive Goes Awry

In 1977, Randy Newman found himself in hot water. His latest hit, which had climbed all the way to number two on the charts, featured a refrain about how “Short people got no reason to live.” The hateful song was not only pulled from rotation at some radio stations but also resulted in death threats for the singer-songwriter.

There was one problem, though. Randy Newman didn’t actually hate people who failed to meet a specific height.

Like some of his other compositions, “Short People” is a satire written from the perspective of a bigot. The fact that people could take it at face value illustrates both its success as a musical work and the ridiculousness of prejudice. But it’s also an example of how deeply entrenched the lamp, or the expressive lens has become. As Newman noted years later, “I had no idea … that anyone could believe that anyone was as crazy as that character.”

Of course, satire can be hard to spot, but the assumption that a work of must art reflects an artist’s actual beliefs has become pervasive. And that pervasiveness is dangerous.

Over the last decade, I’ve seen more people online criticize various forms of art for portraying flawed characters or endorsing troubling views. For example, in a 2021 episode of Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia, the titular Ginny yells at her mom, “What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.”

Not only did Swift’s fanbase come to condemn the show, but Swift herself did too. On Twitter, she wrote, “Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard working women by defining this horse shit as FuNnY.”

Can the writers of a television show make a joke in poor taste? Sure. Can their words also reflect their inner sexism? Of course. But not everything has to reflect the artist’s inner self. It can reflect a character they have created and the world they live in.

Similar controversies bubble up constantly. A key reason is because we are living in the shadow of romanticism, looking at all art through the expressive lens. And it’s a problem. Not only is it incorrect, but it discourages artists from exploring certain material for fear of backlash.

The lamp has led to much great art and criticism over the last two centuries. But we need to remember that there are other perspectives and other ways to be creative. Not every piece of art reflects the artist nor should it.

A New One
"Jock My Style" by ggwendolyn
2026 - Indie Pop

The fun thing when I write about new music is that I usually know nothing about the artist. I can’t speculate on how their personal experience influenced their work. I can just listen to their music and tell you what I like.

ggwendolyn, a name that looks like a typo, has certainly taken cues from some of contemporary pop stars. The vocal tone across her catalog generally is reminiscent of Sabrina Carpenter. The talk-singing on “Jock My Style” specifically has hints of Olivia Rodrigo. But ggwendolyn also has a swaggering style that is uniquely her own.

An Old One
“Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Iron Maiden
1981 - Metal

As I’ve gotten deeper into Edgar Allan Poe’s work over the last few months, I’ve been surprised to learn that he’s been quite impactful on the world of music. Classical composers Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Philip Glass all wrote compositions based on his work. Stevie Nicks adapted his “Annabel Lee.” Lou Reed recounted many of Poe’s works on his 2033 concept album The Raven. Iron Maiden, too, found inspiration in Poe’s grotesque and arabesque.

The heavy metal legends never shied away from a story song. On “Alexander the Great” they recounted the life of the ancient leader. “The Trooper,” inspired by Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” tells a tale from the Crimean War. Their propulsive “Murders in the Rue Morgue” does much the same but focuses on Poe’s influential work of the same name where he created the modern detective story.

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This week’s theme is “the song is the album is the artist,” meaning self-titled albums that also contain a song with the same name. If that sounds confusing, an example will clarify things. Black Sabbath opens their debut studio album Black Sabbath with a song called “Black Sabbath.” Though not common, there are more examples of this than you’d think.

#7 The Good, The Bad & the Queen by The Good, The Bad & the Queen (2007)

If you told me that Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Simon Tong, and Tony Allen were getting together to make an album, I’d assume it would be pretty good. I like the artists all those guys played with (i.e., Blur, Gorillaz, The Clash, The Verve, Fela Kuti). In practice, this supergroup collaboration did not work out, though.

I honestly would struggle to even tell you much about this album. It was so forgettable that I had already forgotten it while it was playing. It was like each of these guys spent so much time trying not to get in the way of one another that nobody did anything interesting.

#6 Kool and the Gang by Kool and the Gang (1969)

Before they were pumping out dance floor anthems, like “Celebration” and “Ladies Night,” Kool and the Gang started out as a funk group from the streets of Jersey City without much need for vocals. In fact, their entire debut album is instrumental.

Because of that, this record often feels like a warm-up, a group whose grooves that would travel the world still trying to find their footing. But even if it’s not all there, these grooves were still strong enough to influence generations. Songs like “Give It Up” have been sampled scores of times, including on hip-hop classics like “Don’t Sweat the Technique.” They hadn’t put it all together yet, but the pieces were in place.

#5 SuperHeavy by SuperHeavy (2009)

About a minute into SuperHeavy’s sole album, I thought to myself, “This singer really sounds like Mick Jagger.” Lo and behold, it was The Rolling Stone wailing over a reggae beat. What was going on?

SuperHeavy was a short-lived supergroup made up of Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, and A. R. Rahman built on a shared bond for the world’s musics, whether it be from the English countryside, the Caribbean Sea, or the mountains of India. That sounds chaotic. But it kind of works. Both Mick Jagger and Damian Marley are too distinct to disappear into a group, but they manage to shape the songs around their respective personalities.

#4 Motörhead by Motörhead (1977)

After being fired from Hawkwind in 1975, the hard-partying bass player Lemmy Kilmister decided to found a new band, Bastard. Some band names likely cap how much you’ll be accepted by the general public (e.g., Diarrhea Planet, Butthole Surfers). “Bastard” is one of those band names. Luckily, Kilmister was convinced by his manager that the name wouldn’t fly. He decided to use the title of the last song he wrote for Hawkwind as his new group’s name: Motörhead.

“Motörhead” is a great name for a band. It’s also a great name for a song. (I guess it’s a great name for an album too.) Though his group is often classified as metal, Lemmy insisted that he was making rock and roll music. Many other hard rockers have claimed much the same. There’s part of me that finds it hard to see the direct line between Lemmy and Chuck Berry. Motörhead plays louder and faster than any of their 1950s forefathers. But there’s another part of me that see what Lemmy means.

Motörhead closes with a cover of “The Train Kept A-Rollin',” a rhythm and blues song that goes back to 1951. As guitarists began to experiment with distortion, they continued covering “The Train Kept A-Rollin'” with great avidity. But the song kept getting heavier and heavier. Tiny Bradshaw → Johnny Burnette → The Yardbirds → Aerosmith. By the time Lemmy got his hands on it, it sounded like a locomotive set aflame. Though he has heavily influenced hard rock and metal players, Lemmy stands in a long line of rock and rollers.

#3 Wilco (The Album) by Wilco (2009)

Most often when a group has a song named after themselves on an album named after themselves, that song is on their debut album. That’s because, as with Motörhead, the group didn’t have a name when they were making their debut album. When Wilco put a self-titled song on a self-titled album, they were 14 years and 7 albums into their career.

Because of this, Wilco’s self-titled track is a bit more tongue-in-cheek than others. In fact, Jeff Tweedy went so far as to describe it as an “infomercial” for the band. That self-awareness is prevalent across this entire record. It’s a folksy, occasionally rocking record that shows an aging group looking in at themselves.

#2 Run the Jewels by Run the Jewels (2013)

Both El-P and Killer Mike of Run the Jewels are emcees that can’t be ignored. Their rhymes are dense. Their voices are gruff. And their messages are direct. Run the Jewels doesn’t mince words about whatever point they are trying to make.

Despite that, all I could think about while listening to this record was the beats. They are propulsive but off-kilter, making you shake so hard that you have to grab hold of the nearest wall. We’ve listened to a lot of hip-hop this year, but I don’t think we’ve heard a record that felt quite like this.

#1 Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley (1958)

On his self-titled record’s self-titled song, there’s something else that is named for Bo Diddley: the beat. The beat on the song “Bo Diddley” has become so pervasive that it is actually known as the “Bo Diddley Beat.” Could I write out the rhythm for you? Sure. But it’s probably easier just to list some songs that use it.

“Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly. “I Want Candy” by The Strangeloves. “Magic Bus” by The Who. “New York Groove” by Ace Frehley. “She’s the One” by Bruce Springsteen. “American Girl” by Tom Petty. “Faith” by George Michael. “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N' Roses. “Desire” by U2. “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” by KT Tunstall. “If It’s Lovin’ that You Want” by Rihanna.

Melding African and Latin rhythms, Bo Diddley’s syncopated beat is a perfect example of the magic of mixing cultures. The song it was originally used in illustrates another level of mixing too. The words in “Bo Diddley” are play on the nursery rhyme “Hush, Little Baby” (e.g., “Bo Diddley buy babe a diamond ring / If that diamond ring don’t shine / He gonna take it to a private eye”).

When you talk about Bo Diddley, you always have to start by talking about his eternal rhythm. But I think people should also be talking about his lyrics. Seldom has anyone achieved the swagger of a line like, “Use a cobra snake for a necktie” on “Who Do You Love.” This is music that grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention.

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Over an hour, Liz and I chatted about why most artists are wrong to sell their publishing, how sync licenses can change your life, Stephen Bishop’s upcoming farewell tour, and so much more. If you want more from Liz, follow her on social media or pick up a copy of her book.

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I first came across you doling out music industry advice to artists on TikTok and Instagram. What compelled you to share such high quality advice for free on the web?

Before COVID, I had a pretty extensive team and they would tell me, “You give boring, helpful information.” They said I should share that information online. But I didn’t like being in front of a camera. I was a behind the scenes person. I was a tour manager for years. I was a photographer. I’ve got stage fright. But I posted a video and it took off. From there, I would just post about the things people asked me.

@lizthemusicmanager#greenscreen American Idol and other major music TV shows need to compensate legacy artists better, ensuring songwriters of classic hits receive the fair pay they deserve for their work… #musicindustry #musicbusiness #fypage #fy #fyp #americanidol #synclicensing #songwriter #songwriters #classicsong #classicsongs #musicindustrytips #musicbiz #musicpublishing #dobetter #cheap #cheaptok #ridiculous

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There are so many people trying to scam young artists that quality advice is worth its weight in gold.

It is.

I know you have a book out. It shares a title with what I think is your catchphrase: Guard Your Publishing. Why are you always telling people that they need to protect their publishing?

About eight years ago, I got into catalog sales. Many legacy artists would reach out to me and ask if they should sell. I would always tell them not to. Copyright lasts a long time. Unless a hedge fund or private equity firm was offering a 90x multiple, I didn’t think it was worth it. You could pass those copyrights down to your kids.

When you sell, you lose control. Neil Young was mad that the NFL was using one of his songs in a commercial. But he couldn’t do anything. He sold. Maybe the most egregious example is “My Way.” It was written by Paul Anka. Now, when I hear it, all I think about is poop. It was in a poop commercial for years after Anka sold. Sinatra would be rolling over in his grave.

I often feel like the flood of music biopics and classic song syncs are just these investors trying to get a return.

I represent Jack Tempchin. He worked with the Eagles, writing songs like “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Already Gone.” But they were all cowrites. Glenn Frey never sold. If Jack sold, the Frey family would have to deal with a private equity firm for the rest of their lives.

Have any of the sales made sense to you?

Only Bob Dylan. His pre-1976 songs are only protected for 95 years. Everything after that is life plus 70 years. So, you only have like 35 years left on those big, 1960s songs. He got a multiple of 26. That’s a pretty good return.

You’ve worked with many legendary artists over the years. Can you tell me a bit about how you got into the industry and found yourself in such rarefied circles?

My dad is a business manager and financial advisor. He worked with some pretty big actors and singers, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. I started doing photography when I was 14, and we would go to parties and I would get to interact with all of these people. So, I got started in tour photography and social media marketing very young.

From there, I got degrees in history and music technology from University of Colorado, Boulder. I think got my masters in music industry administration from Cal State Northridge and UCLA. They had a dual master’s degree program.

After that I moved to Montecito. My dad had a house there, and he said, “I’m going to give you one month free, and then you have to pay me $5,000 a month in rent.” As a 21-year-old, that was crazy. My dad wanted me to struggle. So, I went up to the Santa Barbara Bowl and I said, “Hey, do you guys need a photographer?” I showed them my portfolio and became the house photographer. I got to work with Kenny Loggins and a bunch of other people.

Around 2017, Pat Metheny and Kenny Loggins told me, “Hey, there’s this guy playing at the Catalina Jazz Club in Los Angeles. You should go see him.” So, I go down on my day off. I get a $100 ticket, which was very expensive for me. I look up this guy and he has Grammy and Oscar nominations. His songs have sold 100 million records for other people. He’s sold 15 million himself. I was like, “Why is he playing this dumpy club?” It was a small stage, and it was half full.

He gets on the mic for a mini intermission and is saying how he has all these CDs but no one buys CDs anymore. It was sad. So, I decided to do something crazy. I went and bought every CD he had with an emergency credit card. I wanted to get his attention, so I could talk to him.

@lizthemusicmanager@Stephen Bishop joins me to talk about songwriting, getting your heart broken, Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra, and how sync licensing decisions are actually made. . #fyp #stephenbishop #musicindustry #synclicensing #songwriter

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So, I meet him, and he signs the CDs. He’s asking if I am going to sell them on eBay or something. Afterwards, I took a picture of all the CDs and went to tag him but he had nothing. No social media. No Spotify. All I could tag was his personal page. He then reached out to me. I didn’t have much interest in getting together until Kenny Loggins told me they wrote a song together in the 1980s. His name was Stephen Bishop.

So, we met. I started doing some work for him. I set him up on social media. Fixed up his website. We eventually got married. That was about 10 years ago. Now, we have a two-year-old kid. Stephen has connected me with many of his friends over the years, like Jimmy Webb and J.D. Souther. I’ve worked with Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, and so many other people across touring and ticketing. Since COVID, I’ve just focused on social media marketing management.

You’ve interacted with lots of big name artists. What was the biggest pinch me moment for you?

You would think it would be Eric Clapton, but he was at the house a lot, so I was used to it. Paul McCartney had me starstruck, though. Stephen was giddy to meet him backstage in Vegas. And he knew who Stephen was!

With your decade of experience and your knowledge of Stephen’s career, how has managing publishing changed?

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Did Guitar Hero Change Classic Rock?

By Chris Dalla Riva

I could not tell you what I got for Christmas most years. The family meals and time with my cousins are more vivid in my mind than what was under the tree. That wasn’t the case in 2007, though. I know exactly what Santa left at my house: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

Video games weren’t really my thing growing up. But when I played Guitar Hero II on my friend’s PlayStation 2 not long before Christmas, I knew that I needed the next installment if Activision made a version for the only console I had, the Nintendo Wii. Luckily, they did.

Guitar Hero III had a big impact on a young Chris Dalla Riva. Not only did it make for hours of fun with friends, but it exposed me to scores of great rock songs. Yes, I was already a student of the game in 2007—my guitar lessons having begun a year or two earlier—but the Guitar Hero franchise put some incredible six-string work on my radar, like Blue Öyster Cult’s “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” and Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality.”

There’s no doubt that the Guitar Hero franchise impacted popular music. Many bands saw surges in sales after being featured in the game. The claimed there was new interest in the museum from younger people after the games came out. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick even noted that Aerosmith made more money from their installment of the game than any of their albums.

I’m not interested in those metrics, though. Those are short-term vanity statistics. Aerosmith making millions of dollars in 2008 doesn’t tell me how their legacy is evolving. I want to know if Guitar Hero changed how we think about classic rock.

LOU GRAMM VOICE: “TO BE A GUI-TAR HERO!”

In each of the last 21 years, the popular New York City classic rock station Q104.3 has polled their listeners on the top 1,043 greatest classic rock songs. This fun survey allows us to gauge how the classic rock canon has changed over time. “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down, for example, did not make regular appearances on the list throughout the 2000s. Now, it’s there every year. In short, 3 Doors Down is now a classic rock band.

This dataset, which I wrote about more extensively in my piece “Classic Rock is Changing,” can be put to good use here. First, we can see if songs were more likely to make the list after being included in Guitar Hero. Second, if that were the case, we could then see if the games helped those songs cement themselves in the classic rock canon by moving up the list. I regret to inform that neither of the things happened. Guitar Hero did not change the classic rock canon.

Above you can the percentage of songs from each Guitar Hero game that were included in each of Q104.3’s greatest classic rock songs lists. If these games had an impact on people’s perception of classic rock, then we would expect them to shape the list after their release. They do not.

For example, my beloved Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock came out in late 2007. If the game affected listeners’ perceptions of the past, then we would expect more of the songs from the game to make Q104.3’s list in 2008 and each year after. In 2004, 26.8% of the songs that would be in the game were on the Q104.3 list. In 2008, 29.6% were.

Though you could try to make the case that the small increase is due to the game, it’s really just noise. The rate fluctuates up and down every year, only crossing 30% in a single year. A similar pattern holds for all the other games. They may have led to a short-term boost in sales, but they did not change what fans thought of as classics of the genre.

I found this result kind of upsetting. I really wanted these games to impact the general public—whether they knew it or not—just like they impacted me and my peers. But there’s just not much there.

Maybe if you squint hard enough, you could make the case that certain songs saw some benefit. Eric Johnson’s“Cliffs of Dover” looks to have seen a bump after its inclusion in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. The same goes for Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” in the original Guitar Hero and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in the follow up. Even so, I don’t think the data is compelling enough to really make those claims.

I Guess We Have to Make Classics the Old-Fashioned Way

In my original piece that I built this dataset for, I show how classic rock does indeed change. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” for example, went from missing the list every year for a decade to making the top 100. A video game could inspire a similar trend. Guitar Hero didn’t, though. Why?

First, these games were not trying to be tastemakers. They were balancing recognizability with licensing and engineering constraints. In fact, between 20% (Guitar Hero II) and 45% (Guitar Hero Live) of songs in the games had previously cracked the Hot 100. To boot, those that failed to chart were usually not obscure (e.g., “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughn).

Second, the games always had a healthy serving of contemporary songs, especially as time went on. In the original Guitar Hero (2005), 55% of songs were released after the year 2000. In Guitar Hero Live (2015), 93% were. Songs don’t typically enter the classic rock canon until they’ve been out for at least 20 years. Most of these song aren’t old enough yet.

That may suggest that my analysis thus far is deficient. Once again, I’m sad to report that even if you limit just to songs released before 1996, these games had no notable impact on listener’s perception of classic rock.

Sticking to my favorite installment in the series, 45.7% of songs released before 1996 in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock were on Q104.3’s list the year before the game came out. The year after, 51.4% were. Looks like a notable bump, but the next year it was back down 45.7%. In other words, if you want to write a song that plays endlessly on your local classic rock station, you’ve got to try somewhere else than getting said song in a video game.

A New One
"Grease Baby" by Clutter
2026 - Indie Rock

The riffs that defined the Guitar Hero franchise are not common in the pop world these days. In fact, they’re not even that common in the rock world, the genre looking more to atmosphere than finger-twisting pyrotechnics to get the point across. But Clutter, a Swedish four-piece, has enough riffs on their song “Grease Baby” to satisfy your average Guitar Hero player. To quote at Stereogum, “No wheels are reinvented here, but baby, they’re rolling fast.” That’s just alright by me.

An Old One
"Knights of Cydonia" by Muse
2006 - Progressive Rock

In 1962, The Tornados teamed up with the eccentric producer Joe Meek to make a wacky piece of space age pop that somehow went to the top of the charts: “Telstar.” “Telstar” is a curiosity. It’s an instrumental that sounds like it could soundtrack George Jetson flying to work. Because of that, it’s not a shock that The Tornados didn’t last much longer than their big hit.

But “Telstar” has left an impression in unexpected ways. George Bellamy, the rhythm guitarist on the track, would later have a son named Matthew. Matthew, in turn, would get into the family business, founding the band Muse. In 2006, Muse would score a big hit in the United Kingdom with “Knights of Cydonia,” an homage to Matthew’s father’s work in The Tornados.

Like “Telstar,” “Knights of Cydonia” has propulsive, alien energy. Unlike “Telstar,” it found its way into the Guitar Hero’s 2008 installment. That game did not make “Knights of Cydonia” a classic, but it did help bring the song to my ears.

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This week’s theme is “murdered musicians,” meaning albums by artists who were killed by someone else. We’ve had some grim themes this year (e.g., swan songs), but this is the most macabre by far. Luckily, the albums themselves were not as grisly.

#7 Midnight Love by Marvin Gaye (1982 - Death: Shot by father)

Along with Here, My Dear and That Stubborn Kinda’ Fellow, this is the third Marvin Gaye album we’ve heard this year. And it continues my unpopular theory that “Gaye might have been at his best when he was still firmly within the Motown machine.”

It’s not that Midnight Love is a bad album. The groove on “Sexual Healing” is eternal. But the songwriting on Gaye’s early records is just so tight. Certain songs on Midnight Love, like “Joy” and “Third World Girl,” are just a bit clunkier than something 1960s Motown would have put their stamp on. But Marvin Gaye is singing on this album. So, even when the material left me wanting more, his voice still holds everything together.

#6 Old Time Banjo Pickin’ & Singin’ by Stringbean (1961 - Death: Shot by area men looking for cash)

I think understanding how Stringbean died is actually helpful in understanding his music. David “Stringbean” Akeman was born in the very small town of Annville, Kentucky, in 1915. He got his first banjo in the 1920s and started playing local shows, eventually picking up the nickname “Stringbean” for his long, thin stature. Parlaying his banjo skills with an ability to sing and make jokes, Stringbean became a mainstay in some American households as a regular on the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw.

Stringbean, never rich and famous, carved out a nice career for himself. But his attitudes, especially around money, remained shaped by living through the Great Depression. Rumors circulated that the banjo player and his wife often carried large amounts of cash on them because of their distrust of banks. After returning home from a performance at the Opry, they were ambushed and killed by two people from the area. Later convicted, one cousin died in prison while the other was granted parole after 41 years behind bars.

I tell this depressing story because Stringbean’s old-time attitudes also shaped his music. He’s picking songs on the banjo that sound like they were pulled from the earth. He’s singing about greasy skillets and cheap cotton and how certain hairstyles represent a moral failing. These are songs that you can only do justice to if you live a life like Stringbean.

#5 King Size Soul by King Curtis (1967 - Death: Stabbed during altercation with neighbor)

My knowledge of the saxophone is not deep enough to tell you if King Curtis is the greatest to pick up the instrument, but I can say with certainty that the man knew how to make the instrument sing. King Curtis was best known as a session man, playing on songs like “Respect” by Aretha Franklin and “Yakety Yak” by The Coasters. But he also found occasional success releasing instrumentals.

King Size Soul is a collection of instrumental renditions of hits of the 1960s, along with some originals. King Curtis’s sax sings so lyrically across these tracks that you might start to think that most of these songs didn’t need words. His cover of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is a great example of this, especially as the melody soars during the chorus.

#4 Jaco Pastorius by Jaco Pastorius (1976 - Death: Beaten to death by a bouncer)

I think the most ridiculous recording we’ve heard this year is Jaco Pastorius’s “Donna Lee.” Attributed to Charlie Parker, “Donna Lee” is a lightning fast bebop standard that was not meant to be played as a solo bass piece. Pastorius’s ability to pull it off is proof enough that nobody has ever outplayed him on the four-stringed instrument.

That said, “Donna Lee” still had me worried. It’s the first song on Pastorius’s self-titled record. It made me concerned that I was in for an hour of solo bass. I say this with only complete love for the bass players in my life, but the bass is not a solo instrument. Listening to an album of solo bass would probably be as enjoyable as an album of solo tuba.

Luckily, “Donna Lee” is a bit of an outlier. You do get some other twoodling solo compositions, like “Portrait of Tracy,” but the rest of the album, while cerebral, is more accessible. Something like “Come On, Come Over” could have been a disco hit.

#3 Dreaming of You by Selena (1995 - Death: Shot by agent during a contractual dispute)

Often when trying to capture how Bad Bunny has grown so popular, people point to his ability to combine contemporary trap and hip-hop production with elements of traditional Latin music. It’s something for the kids and something for the parents. Selena was doing the same thing 30 years ago.

Selena Quintanilla got her start in show business singing as a teen in her family band, Selena y Los Dinos. The group initially focused on Tejano music, but Selena’s ambitions proved a bit bigger than the regional genre. Her solo releases began to find larger and larger audiences.

Then tragedy struck. In 1994, the young star brought Yolanda Saldívar on as her agent. Saldívar immediately caused problems. When the Quintanillas realized that Saldívar was embezzling funds, they attempted to sever ties. Selena went to visit her when she had failed to deliver financial records. Saldívar pulled out a gun and shot Selena. She was pronounced dead about an hour later. Saldívar was sentenced to life in prison with possibility of parole. In 2025, her appeal for parole was denied.

In the wake of her tragic, headline-making death, EMI assembled an album of previously recorded material that was supposed to constitute her next album. Dreaming of You was not a rejection of her Tejano roots, but it was a deliberate attempt at a pop crossover. As Bad Bunny would do decades later, it was a success.

Songs like “I’m Getting Used to You” and “Wherever You Are (Donde Quiera Que Estés)” saw her working with major American pop songwriters, like Diane Warren and Desmond Child. Others, like “El Toro Relajo” and “Techno Cumbia,” see her leaning more heavily on her Mexican roots. A good balance of these two sides is “God’s Child (Baila Conmigo),” a collaboration with The Talking Heads’ David Byrne that somehow works. As Latin music came to crossover more throughout the 1990s, it’s undoubted that Selena would have been a huge star.

#2 Sittin’ by the Road by Blaze Foley (2010 - Death: Shot by friend’s son over financial dispute)

Blaze Foley is one of those mythical artists, much like his friend Townes Van Zandt, whose influence on songwriters far outstrips his influence on the general listening public. Foley’s career is far stranger than many of his contemporaries, though. In fact, most of his music went missing. Here is a selection of descriptions of his records from BlazeFoley.com:

• Blaze Foley Inside (LP, 1980): Recorded at Loma Ranch Studios near Kerrville, Texas. The master tapes, which Blaze carried around to show people, were stolen from Blaze’s car.

• Blaze Foley (Vinyl LP, 1984): Blaze’s first eponymous album by Vital Records, it was pressed but never distributed. The executive producer was arrested and entered into the witness protection program. Blaze got boxes of the albums to give to friends and barter.

• “Oval Room” b/w “Girl Scout Cookies” (45 RPM single, 1984): From the Vital Records LP entitled Blaze Foley, recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was pressed and some promotional copies sent out, but due to the executive producer getting busted, they were mostly distributed to friends by Blaze.

• Blaze Foley (LP, 1988): Blaze’s second eponymous album was never pressed … Heartland Records became interested in the project and, through Townes Van Zandt’s executive producer, Harold F. Eggers Jr., eventually got Blaze to sign a contract for distribution of the album. But Blaze was killed before the album could be finished and the master tapes disappeared over legal concerns, eventually being irreparably damaged in a flood.

When you combine this series of mishaps with the fact that Foley was shot and killed by his son’s friend, you’ve got a life filled with bad luck. But lucky for us, some of Foley’s recordings have found the light of day. The man could seriously write a song, using the simplest words to evoke deep emotions. If you want to be a songwriter, the posthumous Sittin’ by the Road is a great place to begin your studies.

#1 Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G. (1994 - Death: Unsolved drive-by shooting)

I had already heard this album, which is generally a no-no for our weekly listening. But Ken figured that given our morbid theme and the name of this album, it was a must. I agreed.

Ready to Die is the album this week that most readily dealt with death. Nearly every song is packed with vivid violent imagery. A track like “Suicidal Thoughts” is also a particularly harrowing listen given Biggie’s fate not long after it came out.

Ready to Die is a great album because Biggie is a gifted storyteller. But it is a cultural touchstone because it doesn’t really matter what Biggie is telling us about. His cadence, flow, and tone are so compelling that the content of his raps almost doesn’t matter.

Ready to Die’s only faults are the same as many of the other 1990s hip-hop albums we’ve listened to this year. First, it is a bit too long. Even the most gifted storyteller will struggle to hold your attention for an hour-and-fifteen-minutes. Cut out a few songs, and this album becomes tight. Second, every sex skit from the rap universe has aged poorly. I know you’re having sex, Biggie. I don’t need a reenactment.

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The thing I like about Campbell’s writing is that it is interesting whether you’re spinning tunes at a wedding or not. I’m genuinely intrigued by what people want played at their wedding reception. I hope you are too.

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The 10 Best Wedding Albums Ever Made

By Matthew Campbell

I spent the last two years building a hand-curated resource of the best wedding songs from the 1950s through the 2010s. Songs were not selected by sales or by the number of streams alone. The songs were chosen by how likely a professional DJ would still play them in front of a room of 150 strangers spanning three generations with confidence.

The finished book totals 1,875 songs from 1,333 artists. Every track was selected from DJing hundreds of weddings and decades of researching wedding music.

When I had a DJ friend review my first finished copy, he asked me an obvious question to him but not so obvious to me. Which album produced the most wedding songs?

My first guesses came to light. There are so many hits by the Bee Gees. Plus, popular songs exist from what are considered the greatest albums of all time. Two include Thriller by Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.

The beginnings of the album versus singles

Before I could rank anything, I had to deal with a singles versus albums dilemma.

Of the 252 songs in the index, 13.4% of the total were released before 1965. The album existed by then. Many artists in the adult pop genre had their songs produced on albums. Frank Sinatra alone accounts for twelve of those songs. During his time at Capitol Records is where the album became an artistic form in the first place. Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Johnny Mathis, and Harry Belafonte are all in this group. All of them were album artists working in a market that bought albums.

The rest of the era was a singles business and made up a larger piece of the pie. “Rock Around The Clock” was not an album track. Neither were the popular hits “In The Still Of The Night,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Love Is Strange,” or “Come Softly To Me.” The doo-wop groups, the rock and roll bands, and the R&B labels sold mostly 45s. The album was where the hit got reprinted afterward, if it got reprinted at all.

So, the early index splits between albums and singles. The majority were singles. The albums were typically assembled a decade or more later for a compilation. As a result, albums released before 1965 were left off of my findings because they had an unfair advantage.

The ranking

I scored albums by the number of distinct song index recordings on the original release. If the index lists Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” Whitney Houston’s version does not count, and The Bodyguard gets omitted from the results.

Studio albums, soundtracks, and compilations all counted. It was based on the theory that if you handed the album to a wedding DJ, what matters is how many usable songs come out of it. Box sets of three or more discs were excluded.

Look at the Type column. Then look at how far you have to go down before you reach a studio album. Nine spots! Nine spots before you find an album that a group of musicians made as a single album.

The studio album ceiling is five songs

Thriller is the best-selling album in history. It contributes five songs to the index.

Shania Twain’s Come On Over is the best-selling country album ever made and the best-selling studio album by a woman in any genre. It has five singles in the index. Plus, it needed sixteen tracks to get there, which is the lowest conversion rate on the entire list at 31%.

Come On Over is the closest thing the album era produced to a purpose-built wedding record. “You’re Still The One” and “From This Moment On” are first dance and anniversary dance standards. “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” is a reception party song banger to this day. “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and the title track are vibe setters for cocktail hours. Yet, it still cannot beat Thriller, which needed only nine tracks to reach the same number.

Those are the winners. Below the top two studio albums, the numbers fall off a cliff. They fall off to the point that no other studio album can be considered a wedding album at modern weddings.

Rumours contributes only two songs. One of the most-owned albums in American history. It is considered one of the greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stone and Time Magazine. It is a masterpiece. Yet, a wedding professional pulls exactly “Dreams” and “You Make Loving Fun” off it. (“Songbird” is a popular love song but not on every wedding playlist.) Escape by Journey contributes one, and you already know which one (i.e., “Don’t Stop Believing”).

Saturday Night Fever is full of hits. It sits at number seven with six songs. I would have bet money it would win outright. It didn’t, because it is padded. Seventeen tracks, and many of them are David Shire instrumentals and disco filler nobody has played on purpose since 1979. Six of seventeen songs is 35%. The most famous dance album ever made converts at roughly the same rate as Queen: Greatest Hits.

Why compilations win

It feels obvious that compilations would dominate this list. A compilation is what you get when somebody goes back through a catalog and pulls out only the songs that survived. That is precisely the same system a wedding professional performs, just done by a label instead of a DJ. Motown 1’s wins this ranking because Motown already did the filtering. Fourteen of its twenty-five tracks still work in a room in 2026. No studio album in seven decades has come close to matching across a comparable span.

The soundtracks win for a similar reason. A music supervisor building The Big Chill or Dirty Dancing or Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 is not curating for coherence or for an artist’s statement. They are curating for immediate emotional legibility in a room where the audience did not choose the music. That is effectively the wedding music job description. It should surprise nobody that The Big Chill converts at 62%, the highest rate on this entire list.

James Gunn built Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 in 2014 out of songs from the 1970s. It’s a movie about a man who never let go of a cassette his mother made him. Seven of its twelve tracks are in the index. That is a better hit rate than Thriller.

The number that actually matters

Here is the statistic that reframed this whole exercise for me. Of the 1,333 artists in the index, 77% appear exactly once. In short, popular music does not survive on the dance floor in bodies of work. It survives in fragments. One song pulled from its parent album outlives the artist’s career, the genre, the format it was pressed on, and keeps working in a room where nobody remembers what album it came from. Nobody would recognize the second-best song on that album if you played it.

Which is why the honest answer to “what is the best wedding album” is that the question contains a bad assumption. The album is the wrong unit. It was the wrong unit in 1958 for most of this material, when the teenage market bought singles. The LP was where a hit got reprinted. It became the wrong unit again in 2005 when the single detached and floated free. The album era is a window into this data. It doesn’t capture the whole thing, though.

The chart-history version of this is that Billboard measured which songs sold in a given week. The album chart measured which collections sold. Neither one measured which songs kept working. It turns out those are radically different questions with radically different answers. 77% one-hit representation is what durability actually looks like.

What I would tell you to buy

If you wanted to hand somebody one physical album and give them the highest concentration of functional wedding music per dollar, the answer is Motown 1’s, and it is not close. Fourteen songs spanning 1961 to 1994. Second place is a soundtrack to a movie that touched the hearts of many named Forrest. Ninth place is Thriller.

I have been doing this since 1993, and I would not have guessed that order. The data does not care what any of us would have guessed, which is generally the best argument for collecting it.

Final thought from a wedding DJ

Just because a song is on the list or in the book doesn’t mean that it will work in every scenario. I see from the list that there are 8 songs by Elvis. I always say that the worst song you can play as a DJ is the one that no one knows. If the guests are a younger audience, “Teddy Bear” would never get played.

Matthew Campbell is the founder of Wedding Hit Records and the author of The Wedding Music Canon, a 360-page hand-curated index of 1,875 wedding songs across seven decades. The rankings above were computed from that index.

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The Biggest One-Hit Wonder

By Chris Dalla Riva

Quick! Name a one-hit wonder. I’ll start: The Knack. The American power pop quartet had a single smash: “My Sharona.” Right? Well, not exactly. Though “My Sharona” was huge, its follow-up, “Good Girls Don’t,” peaked at number 11. The single after that, “Baby Talks Dirty,” cracked the top 40 too. Sure, “My Sharona” is much better known than the rest of their catalog, but it’s not really fair to call The Knack a “one-hit wonder.” They had more than one hit.

The Knack is a good example of what I have dubbed “The One-Hit Wonder Paradox.” The One-Hit Wonder Paradox captures the fact that many artists we think of as one-hit wonders actually had multiple hits.

• Looking Glass: Most known for their seaside tale “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” the New Jersey group got to number 33 with “Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne” a year after releasing their classic.

• Simple Minds: Despite being most associated with their “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” Simple Minds scored four top 40 hits in the US. In fact, the “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” follow-up “Alive and Kicking,” got all the way to number three.

• Desiigner: The New York rapper took his “Tiimmy Turner” to number 34 not long after releasing his massive trap hit “Panda.”

You get a corollary to this paradox when you state the converse: artists who had one hit that we don’t think of as one-hit wonders. Fiona Apple is a good example of this. Apple has spent decades as a celebrated singer-songwriter, yet her only hit was “Criminal,” which peaked at 21 in 1997. Thus, if “one-hit wonder” means a group or artist that had only one top 40 hit then Fiona Apple is a one-hit wonder and The Knack is not. That can’t be right.

So, what do we mean when we describe an artist as a “one-hit wonder”? Clearly, it doesn’t mean that they had one hit in the traditional sense. To unravel this paradox—and figure out who the true biggest one-hit wonders are—I decided to take a look.

I Wonder What Makes a One-Hit Wonder

As with many analyses, I started with Wikipedia. The internet’s free encyclopedia has a list of over 1,700 one-hit wonders going back to 1951. This is a good place to start not only because of the large temporal scope but because their definition is expansive. Fiona Apple and The Knack are both on the list. We need to cast a wide net before we can winnow things down to true one-hit wonders.

I then used this list to get the ten most popular songs from each artist on Spotify. This was a tremendously tedious process. Since Spotify has severely limited their API as artificial intelligence technologies have hoovered up every piece of data on the internet, I had to manually screenshot every page. I then fed those screenshots into an image extraction program to get the stream counts. (This is probably a good time to say that if you want to support me in continuing to do these insane tasks, consider taking out a paid subscription.)

After some data cleaning, I had stream counts for over 14,000 songs performed by thousands of supposed one-hit wonders. Using that information, we could try to figure out what it means to actually be a one hit-wonder.

First, let’s start by sorting our potential one-hit wonders by streams of their top songs. It’s a simple methodology, but the results make a lot of sense. If I asked you to name another song by “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” singer Scott McKenzie, you’d likely be at a loss for words. Same goes for Norman Greenbaum and 4 Non Blondes. These are artists who are genuinely only associated with a single song.

But there are some oddities here too. Take Kate Bush as an example. Though very popular in the United Kingdom, Bush’s only top 40 hit in the US was “Running Up That Hill.” That fits the very simple definition of a one-hit wonder. She had one hit. And that single hit only became bigger after being featured in Stranger Things in 2022.

That said, Kate Bush is not a one hit wonder. She is more akin to Fiona Apple, releasing decades of acclaimed music. Whereas very few people will be able to name a song by Katrina and the Waves other than “Walking on Sunshine,” scores of fans would be able to talk endlessly about the Kate Bush discography. I can tell you this because I understand Kate Bush’s place in the pantheon of popular music. But the data tells the same story.

Among their top songs, “Walking on Sunshine” accounts for 97.4% of Katrina and the Waves’ streams. “Running Up That Hill,” by contrast, only accounts for 58.6% of the streams among Kate Bush’s top ten songs. In other words, Bush has one song much more popular than the rest of her discography, but there remains interest in the rest of that discography.

If we limit our list just to artists whose top song accounts for at least 75% of streams among their top ten and then sort by total streams, we get a slightly better list. No longer are we seeing artists with genuine fanbases, like Kate Bush and The Verve and The Neighborhood. It’s just artists with one giant hit that overshadows everything else they’ve done.

Now, let’s take this a step further. To do so, we need to turn to Rockwell, the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy that scored a hit with “Somebody’s Watching Me” mostly because Michael Jackson sang an uncredited vocal on the song. Rockwell’s top ten songs on Spotify are almost all different versions of “Somebody’s Watching Me.” If there were any symbol of one-hit-wonder-dom, this is it.

The above table is looking for artists whose top song accounts for at least 75% of streams among their top ten and at least three of those songs are different versions of the same hit. Again, we then sort by streams of the big hit.

This leaves us with what I think is the ultimate one-hit wonder list. “Sh-Boom” tops the list for the 1950s. “Sugar, Sugar” does the same for the 1960s. From there we have “Come and Get Your Love,” “Your Love,” “What’s Up?”, “The Reason,” and “Let Her Go” for the rest of the decades. Throw in some Sheb Wooley and Lou Bega, and we’ve got ourselves an immortal list of one-hit wonders.

Resolving the One-Hit Wonder Paradox

After crunching these numbers, I think a resolution to The One-Hit Wonder Paradox begins to emerge. A one-hit wonder doesn’t need to actually have a hit in the traditional sense. It can help. But nobody needs to crack the top 40 to join the one-hit wonder hall of fame. You just need to meet a few criteria.

• You must have released at least an album’s worth of songs. Do I really need to call Ollie & Jerry a one-hit wonder because they only scored a hit with “Breakin’... There’s No Stopping Us” in 1984? The duo basically put out no other music. It’s no wonder they only had one hit.

• The one-hit should be well known by the general public. It doesn’t feel fair, for example, to call Cathy Carr a one-hit wonder. Yes, she scored one hit with “Ivory Tower” in 1956, but nobody knows any of her music these days. She’s a zero-hit wonder, a status most musicians—myself included—have reached.

• One-hit wonder status cements itself over time, usually at least a decade. Gloria Gaynor proves a good example. Though she first nabbed a hit in 1974 with “Never Can Say Goodbye,” that song’s success paled in comparison to 1978’s “I Will Survive” as time went on.

• The one-hit should so thoroughly dominate an artist’s catalog that you could scarcely name another song by them. In other words, the song should be bigger than the artist themselves. This heuristic can usually be quantified by the fact that (a) that song accounts for nearly all of the artist’s plays on a given streaming platform and (b) there are multiple versions of that song scattered throughout an artist’s top songs.

By this definition, nearly anybody can become a one-hit wonder. Today, it is Soft Cell, but one day it might be someone whose catalog you consider very deep, like The Killers. “Mr. Brightside” might be just a little too popular. Watch out, Brandon Flowers.

A New One
"hey" by Artist
2026 - Alternative Emo

It feels like Sopp has been tossing off ideas as they come to him. This year, he’s released over 20 songs, most shorter than two-and-a-half minutes. Each composition is a little vignette, like a dream that fades just as it’s coming into focus. We have no idea how his career will shape up, but I will be anxiously watching and listening.

An Old One
"Turn the Beat Around" by Vicki Sue Robinson
1976 - Disco

I stumbled upon many interesting one-hit wonders during the writing of this piece. But the song that most struck me was one that I had heard before: “Turn the Beat Around” by Vickie Sue Robinson. As the name suggests, “Turn the Beat Around” is a celebration of rhythm generally and disco rhythm specifically. The rhythm section is naturally what stands out in this song. But it’s Robinson’s vocal in verse two, where she imitates various percussive sounds, that make the song a one-hit wonder worth remembering.

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This week’s theme is “random Rolling Stone,” meaning albums on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest 500 albums of all time selected randomly. More specifically, each day we had a random number generator pick an integer between 1 and 500. We then went to that numbered album on Rolling Stone’s list. If we’d heard the album, we moved up the list until we found one new to our ears. Then we clicked play.

#7 Diana by Diana Ross (1980 - No. 394)

Diana Ross has always struck me as an unexpected diva. She doesn’t have the pipes of Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston. She also doesn’t have the vision of Madonna or Beyoncé. Because of that, Diana Ross sets herself apart through tone, her crystalline voice being the perfect combination of hypnotizing and evocative. The problem is that tone can’t do much when the songs aren’t very good.

Of course, there are two stone-cold classics on Diana: “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out.” But I think people’s love for those songs distracts them from the fact that the rest of the album is lackluster. You get some nice Nile Rodgers’ rhythm guitar work on songs like “Give Up,” but even that can’t redeem the cheesiness of “Have Fun (Again)” and dreariness of “Friend to Friend.”

#6 Power, Corruption & Lies by New Order (1983 - No. 262)

When I hated on New Order’s Movement during our “First Album, Second Act” week, I had multiple people tell me that I needed to give them a second a chance. Their first album is not representative of the quality of their work. When the random number generator spit back Power, Corruption & Lies this week, I got the chance to see if those people were telling the truth. They were.

Power, Corruption & Lies is dramatically better than Movement. The propulsive groove and howled lyrics on “Age of Consent” are transcendent. The synth hook on “Your Silent Face” goes down like a warm cup of tea on a cold winter’s day. Some songs, like “We All Stand” and “5 8 6,” felt half-baked, but I must give the people credit: I’m glad I gave New Order a second chance.

#5 The B-52s by The B-52s (1979 - No. 198)

One thing I’ve learned listening to so many albums this year is that even songs that you are familiar with can still surprise you. Take “Rock Lobster” as an example. Probably The B-52s most famous song after “Love Shack,” I’ve heard “Rock Lobster” a million times. But I had no idea the album cut runs for nearly seven minutes. That’s a long time, especially for a song that mostly sits on one groove.

The decision to sit on that one groove for so long is actually representative of The B-52s and their self-titled record. Take “Planet Claire” as an example. The quintet is willing to ride one mysterious riff for an entire song. Their willingness to do that makes for music that is hypnotic, that urges you to move while also making you feel a bit uncomfortable.

#4 20 Golden Greats by Buddy Holly (1978 - No. 166)

When Ken and I began this album quest, the only rules we set were that the choices could not be compilations, live albums, or double albums. The first two rules were added because we wanted to focus on studio records. The third was because we’re busy guys. We don’t have time for the two-plus hours of Sandinista or Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Thus far, we’ve followed these rules. Until today. As the name suggests, 20 Golden Greats is a Buddy Holly greatest hits compilation.

So, why did we decide to give Buddy Holly a pass? First, it was on the Rolling Stone list. Second, Buddy Holly died so young that he didn’t have time to put out many albums. Third, we love Buddy Holly. Because of that final point, we were familiar with much of this record, especially the rockers on the first half, like “That’ll Be the Day” and “Not Fade Away.”

But Buddy Holly was more than rockers. The back half of 20 Golden Greats gives you a taste of that. Tracks like “Raining in My Heart” and “True Love Ways” rely more on strings than your typical rock band setup. Those songs make Holly’s death all the more painful. It’s clear that his aspirations were bigger than many of his rock and roll contemporaries. Rest in peace, Buddy. We’re still asking “what if?” all these years later.

#3 Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty (1989 - No. 298)

Not long after country star Jason Aldean took the stage at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, tragedy struck. A gunman opened fire from the cover of an area hotel leading to one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history. When Saturday Night Live took to the air a week later, the camera opened on Aldean. The frontman began to speak:

This week, we witnessed one of the worst tragedies in American history. Like everyone, I’m struggling to understand what happened that night and how to pick up the pieces and start to heal. So many people are hurting. There are children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends. They’re all part of our family. So I want to say to them, we hurt for you and we hurt with you. But you can be sure that we’re going to walk through these tough times together, every step of the way. Because when America is at its best, our bond and our spirit — it’s unbreakable.

Moments later, Aldean and his band kicked off a performance Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” Given that it declares, “You can stand me up at the gates of hell / But I won’t back down,” “I Won’t Back Down” was a fitting selection in the wake of this tragedy. But it was doubly fitting. Tom Petty died of unrelated causes the day after the massacre.

“I Won’t Back Down” comes from Tom Petty’s 1989 solo record Full Moon Fever, an important record for a few reasons. First, it was Petty’s debut record without The Heartbreakers. Second, it’s part of a trio of albums by Traveling Wilbury alumni produced by fellow Wilbury, Jeff Lynne. Third, it contains Petty’s three biggest solo songs as measured by streams: “Free Fallin',” “I Won’t Back Down,” and “Runnin' Down a Dream.”

But the record’s context is not why I enjoyed it. It’s the directness of the songwriting. Not only would most people get laughed out of the room for writing something as direct as “I Won’t Back Down,” but they wouldn’t have the gall to even try. Tom Petty’s superpower is his directness. Songs like “The Apartment Song” and “Yer So Bad” are not steeped in symbolism. They are earnest statements about how things are and how they ought to be. That’s the reason Tom Petty is a guy whose music you can turn to after a tragedy.

#2 Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock (1973 - No. 254)

Whenever Rolling Stone publishes a list, the internet gets angry. Here are some replies from when they updated their greatest albums list in 2020:

• “This has got to be your worst list yet. Congratulations are in order I suppose.”

• “No Superunknown by Soundgarden!? Nowhere in the top 500!!?? Really!!!???”

• “Where is the Monkees’ Headquarters or Pieces Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Ltd”

• “Who would put Loretta Lynn on this list but exclude Shania Twain......that’s insane!”

• “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit”

I’ve been known to hate on Rolling Stone lists. I once wrote the magazine an angry letter when they left Stephen Foster off their list of greatest songwriters. But after I worked with The Pudding on massive of analysis of how the album list has evolved over the decades, I came to respect their process a bit more.

There is no perfect list. The Rolling Stone list, for example, is biased toward rock and pop. But if you were to sit down and listen to every album, you would get a great musical education. Head Hunters is a good reminder of that.

Head Hunters is a fusion album. It was also a commercial breakthrough for Herbie Hancock, the jazz legend that got his start in the bebop world. I have serious doubts that your average Rolling Stone list complainer has engaged with the works of Herbie Hancock. And they are missing out.

Though it’s only four tracks, Head Hunters has enough material to keep you entranced. “Chameleon” has grooves for days. “Watermelon Man” has an intro played on a beer bottle that somehow melts your brain. “Sly” has enough wild sax runs to please even the most ardent bebop fans. And “Vein Melter” has graceful, sinewy vibes to cool you off. Does Rolling Stone have it perfect? No. But give them a chance if it at least means you get some Herbie Hancock in your life.

#1 Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals (1973 - No. 344)

I’ve often struggled with reggae albums because I find they get rhythmically redundant. Of course, this is likely driven by my lack of exposure to the genre. If I don’t complain about rock music for its love of the two and the four, then I shouldn’t take issue with the reggae skank. On Funky Kingston, I never took issue with the skank. In fact, I was begging for more.

Funky Kingston is this album’s name, but it is also its descriptor. It’s a funky take on music borne out of Kingston, Jamaica. And that funk is what drew me in. I could listen to the Maytals groove on songs like “Sailin' On” and “In the Dark” until the end of my days. And even if you’re a reggae skeptic, Toots and his group give you something to hold onto via their renditions of American classics “Louie Louie” and “Country Roads.”

Both songs fit the reggae rhythm seamlessly. This isn’t a shock for “Louie Louie.” Though most famously done by The Kingsmen, Richard Berry was inspired by the Afro-Cuban tune “El Loco Cha Cha” while writing the song. So, there is some island blood in “Louie Louie.”

The John Denver classic “Country Roads” has none of that blood. It comes from the hills of Appalachia. But when Toots sings, “West Jamaica, my ole mama / Take me home country roads,” you’d think that John Denver wrote the song on an island vacation. This is the power of music. A song cowritten by an American military brat can make as much sense to a listener in the Caribbean or the Far East as it does to those living in the countryside that inspired it.

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I assume you don’t hate Graceland, though. I sure don’t. “You Can Call Me Al” is a staple in cover sets I play with my cousin, and the title track can get me near tears. Ashley Kahn is the best guide you could ask for to take you through this album. Over an hour, we talked about the international recording process that brought the album together and why it was steeped in such controversy. If you enjoy our conversation, celebrate the 40th anniversary of Graceland by picking up a copy of his book, Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland.

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Graceland is a touchstone in the Paul Simon catalog, but it was quite different from everything he’d done up to that point. First, can you tell me a bit about how Graceland stood apart musically in the Paul Simon catalog at that time?

Graceland stands apart in myriad ways both in terms of the music that was popular in 1986 and from what Paul Simon had done up to that point. Pop music at the time was driven by new technology, like synthesizers and drum machines. And to that point, Simon’s music had been going in a jazzier direction. Think of Still Crazy After All These Years and even Hearts and Bones, the album before Graceland. These were introspective songs from a middle-aged creative. That’s what Paul Simon was known for.

In one sense, Graceland was a return to roots as he was looking back to the song structures and ideas he’d fallen in love with when he was much younger. Elvis Presley. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Early doo-wop groups. He was returning to that form and energy but through South African rhythms and western Louisiana zydeco groups and the norteño rock.

So, sonically Graceland was quite different. But it also represented a shift in songcraft. In the past, Simon always started with chords on the guitar and words. From there, he’d develop the rest of the music and the rhythm. On Graceland, he was often starting with the rhythm track. It was kind of a hip-hop approach. You make a beat and then write harmonic material around that. This approach probably wouldn’t have been possible without the emergence of digital technology of the 1980s.

Writing a book about an album is no easy job. I find that it’s not always enjoyable to read about albums that I love. The process isn’t always as interesting as the music itself. But Graceland is interesting because the actual process of constructing it was so unique. Can you talk a bit about the process of making the album?

Every track is the result of collaboration, and I don’t mean collaboration in the sense of like Phil Spector going into a studio and saying, “Hey, you do this.” Simon is actually creating the music in the moment with the artists that he’s with. His collaborative approach would differ. Sometimes it was in the control room listening to what the band is doing. Other times he’s in the studio directing the flow of the musicians.

This was an approach he’d used in the past to some degree. For “Mother and Child Reunion,” he’d gone down to Jamaica. But he’d never taken this approach for an entire project. So, this was risky, especially when you consider the politics in South Africa at the time.

I’m glad you bring up “Mother and Child Reunion” because I want to ask if you think there were seeds of Graceland’s process in Simon’s earlier work?

It’s a good question. “Mother and Child Reunion” is probably the closest we get to the Graceland approach, but he’d also brought in a gospel group for a song like “Love Me Like a Rock.” He definitely always found some appeal in working with other musicians.

The seeds of Graceland were in a bootleg cassette that a friend gave him of a style of music called “township jive.” It’s very upbeat with blues-type chords. It’s got rock and roll energy. He was listening to it in the car and coming up with lyrics. He’d never done something like that before. It put his creative machine into hyperdrive.

He later went to his record company and said he didn’t want to recreate this sound with New York studio cats. He wanted the actual musicians who were on the cassette. That was really the idea that birthed Graceland. He wanted to go to South Africa during the height of apartheid to work with the musicians on that tape.

And that was controversial, right?

Of course. This was the time of economic and cultural sanctions against South Africa. Simon was very, very meticulous about how to make this project work. It was a political minefield. He started by talking with Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones about this idea. He then got word through a South African producer named Hilton Rosenthal that the local musicians wanted to work with him. Simon then said he’d pay them triple scale U.S. union musician rates. He wanted to do this and to do it right.

Another piece of controversy around this record was the songwriting credits. As it was very collaborative, there was a fluid nature of who did what. Many of the African artists got credits, which I’m sure was appreciated, especially when the album sold millions of copies. But there was some tension with Los Lobos because they didn’t get songwriting credit on the album’s final track. Do you think credits were doled out fairly?

The controversial aspects of this are very unique across Paul’s discography. To answer your question, I’m going to do what I do in the book and just lay out the facts and let the reader decide. Pinpointing exactly what happened is very difficult, and it’s frequently worked out in legal battles.

So, the argument between Los Lobos and Paul Simon is nothing new in the music world. It’s unfortunate that it has come down to name-calling. Paul has remained mum on the subject, but there is a lot of vitriol around that track. Paul’s stance has mostly been that if they felt a certain way they could sue him.

But, like I said, I just wanted to lay out the facts for the reader. There were witnesses to those sessions, and they noted how the sessions did not go smoothly. It just seems like there was a lot of miscommunication. No one’s a perfect sinner or saint, but I choose to judge Graceland as a complete record. The right intentions were there the whole time.

The songwriting credits actually make Graceland feel very contemporary because credits are doled out more liberally these days. When you combine that with the fact that he was writing to a track, which—to go back to what you said before—is similar to how hip-hop is made, it really feels like a process people are going through right now.

What comes to mind for me is Motown. That’s how they used to do it. They had different departments. One group would lay down a rhythm track. The tape of that groove would get shipped to songwriters who would write to it. That was Paul’s approach on Graceland.

There were additional questions around songs like “Gumboots.” That was a Boyoyo Boys song that Paul wrote lyrics too. Interestingly, that ended up being the song he was least happy with coming out of the Johannesburg sessions. Since it was part of what birthed the album, he had a sentimental attachment to it.

Of course, the songwriting credit controversies were all a sideshow to the real controversy: Paul Simon went into apartheid South Africa to make this album. Do you think any of the criticism levied at Simon was deserved?

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In KPop Demon Hunters, “Golden” is performed by HUNTR/X, a K-pop girl group who also fight demons. The otherworldly nature of the plot called for a song that was also otherworldly. Ejai, the singer-songwriter behind Rumi, one of the film’s protagonists, has repeatedly noted that they “intentionally wrote a challenging vocal line” to evoke that otherworldliness.

And this vocal line is a doozy. It requires both a three-octave range and the ability to hit pitches over and over that would give an opera singer trouble. In fact, it’s so difficult that Ejai doesn’t even sing it in the original key when she performs it live. Kelly Clarkson stuck with the original key, though.

After her gold-star performance of “Golden,” a joke resurfaced about her generational vocal talents: American Idol debuted in 2002 with the intent to find the best undiscovered vocal talent in the country and got it right on the first try. If you don’t follow, the joke is that despite running for 25 seasons, American Idol never found a better singer than Kelly Clarkson, the first season’s winner.

I agree with that sentiment. But it does undersell how many notable careers American Idol launched. Kelly Clarkson. Carrie Underwood. Jennifer Hudson. Adam Lambert. Chris Daughtry. And that ignores the contestants who never ascended to stardom but had some solid hits after the show, like Phillip Phillips and Scotty McCreery.

The fact that decades later there are that many recognizable names from a television talent competition is actually astounding, especially when you consider how the long-running Idol competitor The Voice has turned out almost none.

Inspired by this observation, Kelly Clarkson’s performance of “Golden,” and my recent listening to failed American Idol winners, I wanted to get a better sense for just how unique American Idols’ success was and when it lost its magic charm.

Every TV Singing Contest is Dead

Let’s start in the simplest place possible. We’ll look at how many top 40 hits winners from American Idol and The Voice respectively had by season. A quick glance shows us that there is no competition between these singing competitions. American Idol winners have scored 655% more top 40 hits than their The Voice counterparts. Even excluding American Idol’s season one and season four outliers (i.e., Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood), Idol victors still best The Voice by almost 300%.

There is something missing from our discussion, though. No winner of either show has scored a top 40 hit since season eleven. That’s a long time. American Idol’s season eleven aired in 2012 with Phillip Phillips taking home the crown. The Voice’s aired in 2016 with Sundance Head winning.

These two winners are another great example of the divergent fates for winners of each show. After his victory, Phillips scored two massive hits with “Home” and “Gone, Gone, Gone,” along with the smaller “Raging Fire.” His career has been quieter since then—he appeared on the 2026 season of The Masked Singer—but it’s gone much better than Sundance Head’s. Head never scored a top 40 single. The latest news that I can find on him is that he accidentally shot himself in the stomach in 2024.

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Now, American Idol and The Voice work differently. The former has mostly a cappella auditions in front of a panel of judges. The latter uses a blind audition format where the contestant is backed by a musical ensemble. But I don’t think these divergences explain the fates of each program’s respective winners. It’s mostly timing.

American Idol began airing in 2002, and its most popular winners were in the first few years of the show. The Voice’s first season was in 2011. By then, Idol was already on its tenth season and not producing many stars. What was going on around then?

Media was becoming more fractured as websites like Facebook and Twitter began to steal eyeballs from CBS and NBC. In short, less people watched or cared about network television. A good illustration of this is American Idol’s ratings. At its peak, Idol was the number one show on television, pulling in 30 million viewers twice per week and nearly 40 million for the finale.

The Voice, by contrast, never averaged more than 16 million viewers per episode. It also never broke that mark for a finale. Yes, that’s still a lot of people, but it does not indicate cultural ubiquity. At its peak, an American Idol finale was reaching more than one and ten Americans. It’s much easier to launch a career when such a large portion of the population is watching.

But What about the Magic of Simon, Paula, and Randy?

If American Idol’s star-making power was really driven by timing more than some musical magic, then similar shows airing around the same time would also be able to produce stars at a near-equal rate. Lucky for us, just the show existed.

American Idol was inspired by British show called Pop Idol that functioned much the same. Pop Idol only ran for two seasons, but it was soon replaced by an even bigger British musical competition: The X Factor. Because The X Factor debuted two years after American Idol, it’s a much better comparison.

Across their respective first 15 seasons, The X Factor winners scored 35% more top 40 hits on their local chart than American Idol winners. Furthermore, The X Factor continued to generate hits after Idol’s cultural might was diminished. Little Mix, the season eight winner, is arguably the biggest act to come out of the show. Though they found effectively no success in the US, some other winners of the British show did, like James Arthur and Leona Lewis.

What’s most interesting is that even though winners of The X Factor continued to score some hits as the years went on, the show was mostly out of steam when they aired season ten in 2013. I’m sure viewer fatigue partially diminished the show’s hit-making ability, but as with Idol, a bigger factor was media fragmentation: Less people were watching the show.

So, Who’s the King of the TV Singing Contest?

Thus far, our comparisons have only looked at winners of these various singing competitions. But, as noted with American Idol, sometimes a runner-up managed to launch a big career too, like Jennifer Hudson. The same thing has happened on other shows. One Direction, for example, came in third on season seven of The X Factor. Similarly, Morgan Wallen didn’t make the podium on season six of The Voice.

To put this all together, let’s look at the careers of all finalists across the singing competition universe. This will include The X Factor and American Idol, along with the UK and US versions of The Voice. Since the shows didn’t have the same number of finalists, we’ll look at the percentage of finalists to score a top 40 hit in their home country after the conclusion of their season.

The same trends we noted earlier remain. The X Factor and American Idol were both churning out hitmakers regularly throughout the 2000s with between 15% and 35% of finalists scoring at least one top 40 hit. While The X Factor’s streak continued into the early 2010s, no show was a match for an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Both iterations of The Voice, which didn’t begin airing until after 2010, have produced close to no stars outside of Morgan Wallen (US) and Becky Hill (UK).

Another illustration of how much the success of the contestants on these shows was a product of television monoculture is how infrequently these performers crossed over from the country their competition aired in. Kelly Clarkson and One Direction are arguably the only true international stars to come out of the singing contest universe.

So, did any of these contests ever find a better singer than Kelly Clarkson? No. They launched some bigger careers than hers, but I don’t think anybody has matched her vocal prowess. If you think you can give Clarkson a run for her money, my one piece of advice is not to launch your career by auditioning for The Voice. Sure, you might get to sing a duet with Adam Levine, but nobody will have any idea who you are after the lights dim.

A New One
"Bittersweet" by Rachel Croft
2026 - Heartland Rock

Old media is dead. The nonexistent power of television singing competitions is evidence of that. But sometimes old media still has power, especially when it is enabled by new media.

Just a few days ago, I came across Rachel Croft on TikTok. She spent four months painstakingly making a stop-motion animation for recent single, “Bittersweet.” Though the video hearkens back to the MTV-era visuals of a-ha’s “Take On Me” and Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” the song bears more resemblance to the riding-down-the-highway power of 1970s Bruce Springsteen and the equally propulsive 2010s work of The War on Drugs.

An Old One
"Feels Like Tonight" by Daughtry
2006 - Pop Rock

People were shocked when Chris Daughtry was eliminated from season five of American Idol. Even if you don’t like the strain of rock music that he makes—often derisively referred to as “butt rock”—you have to admit that the man can sing. Frankly, he was probably the best vocalist from that season, especially when you consider that Taylor Hicks ended up wearing the crown.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Chris Daughtry’s post-Idol music. 2000s recently-divorced radio rock, like “It’s Not Over,” doesn’t do much for me. That said, I was always struck by his “Feels Like Tonight” because it read as a pop song despite being dressed up with guitars. I wasn’t surprised when I found out who wrote it: Dr. Luke and Max Martin.

If Max Martin is certainly the most successful songwriter of the last 25 years, then the disgraced Dr. Luke isn’t far behind him. They’ve written hits for Katy Perry and Britney Spears and Kesha, among many others. For a moment in the earlier 2000s, they got involved with rock music, though. This Daughtry song is their best entry in the genre after Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Pink’s “Who Knew.”

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This week’s theme is “American Idols disappointments,” meaning performers who won American Idol that didn’t find outstanding success after the show. “Disappointments” definitely overstates what we are looking for, though. We really just wanted to listen to champions who weren’t Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. We honestly didn’t even want to touch those whose success was on a level below, like Jordin Sparks or Philip Phillips. But we couldn’t come up with a better word.

#7 You Got 'Em All by Trent Harmon (2018 - Season 15)

Ken and I have listened to a lot of albums this year—274 to be exact. That’s more albums than there have been days. Even so, I can still tell you something about each of those albums. Well, almost. Trent Harmon changed that.

Trent Harmon, American Idol’s season 15 winner, left so little impression on me with his debut album that I actually forgot that we listened to it. When I went to put this article together, I briefly thought we only listened to six albums. Now that I’ve gone back, I can tell you a few things about it:

1. It’s boilerplate, radio-friendly pop country

2. Track three, “Hold On,” opens with one of the most trite lyrics of the year: “Ain’t nothing but heartbreak on the 6 o’clock news / Well, they might as well call it the 6 o’clock blues.”

3. The cover art for the lead single, “There’s a Girl,” might be the worst cover art I’ve seen this year

Point three feels like a bit of an exaggeration. We’ve seen some doozies this year. Just last week, we had to look at the eyesore that is the cover art from Creed’s Human Clay. But Trent Harmon takes the cake.

#6 Testify by Caleb Johnson (2014 - Season 13)

The first few seasons of American Idol turned out genuine superstars. In fact, you didn’t even have to win the show to launch a big career. Jennifer Hudson. Chris Daughtry. Adam Lambert. These performers became household names after losing.

But the show started to lose its magic touch as the 2000s wore on. I’d argue that the last season to produce a genuine star was season 11, when Philip Phillips took home the crown. Caleb Johnson was the victor in one of those post-Phillips seasons.

Caleb Johnson wants to be a rock star. Between the aforementioned Chris Daughtry and Adam Lambert, American Idol had a decent track record with producing rock stars. Caleb Johnson is not one of those successes. His album Testify sounds like an overblown tribute to Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell if someone had described Bat Out of Hell to you, never let you listen to it, and told you to make an album that sounded like it. It’s all theatrics and bombast without the humor or the substance.

#5 Taylor Hicks by Taylor Hicks (2006 - Season 5)

Like most of the country, my family was deep in our American Idol obsession when season five aired. From the auditions, I was rooting for one contestant: Taylor Hicks. I don’t regret it. Taylor Hicks was a fun performer. But in a season with Katherine McPhee and Chris Daughtry, there is no way Taylor Hicks should have won.

Taylor Hicks is not a bad singer. If you showed up to a wedding and he was fronting the band, you’d walk away thinking it was the greatest wedding band you’d ever seen. But Hicks doesn’t have the chops or the feel to carry an album of original music.

Taylor Hicks is also interesting because, for someone who won a music competition, he hasn’t released that much music. Frankly, you don’t have to look that far to find other Idol winners whose musical output has been meagre. Season 12 winner Candice Glover has released a single album in the 13 years since her win. Season 18 winner Samantha Diaz never even dropped an album. Winning a singing competition is one thing. Having a music career is another.

#4 David Cook by David Cook (2008 - Season 7)

David Cook is another aspiring rocker from Idol-ville. No, his vocal power does not approach the aforementioned Idol losers Chris Daughtry and Adam Lambert. But I would listen to David Cook sing for a thousand hours before turning on his fellow rocking victor Caleb Johnson again.

David Cook’s self-titled record is the first album we listed to this week that actually had some standout tracks. “The Time of My Life” is a strong power ballad about accomplishing your dreams very much in the Idol winner tradition (e.g., “A Moment Like This”). “Declaration” is an equally powerful number with some intriguing guitar work. I didn’t need nearly 50 minutes of his music, though.

#3 Kris Allen by Kris Allen (2009 - Season 8)

Kris Allen arrived at exactly the right and the wrong time. The season 8 winner had the perfect smooth tone for the soft rock that found success on the radio during the 2000s with acts like The Fray, The Script, Train, and Jason Mraz . His “Live Like We’re Dying” is not only a perfect example of this sound but an excellent song. He was a man made for the moment.

But given that I can easily call to mind so many others working in this style, there was also stiff competition. Allen also won Idol just after the popularity of this sound was beginning to crest. It was everywhere, but it was about to be nowhere. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise you that the follow up to his post-Idol debut sold a tenth of the copies.

#2 Soulful by Ruben Studdard (2003 - Season 2)

Ruben Studdard is one of those winners who made us feel bad in using the word “disappointment” to describe the artists this week. Rubben Studdard is not Carrie Underwood, but he’s also not a failure. He’s sold millions of albums and scored two top ten singles, along with continuing to tour and landing periodic acting gigs.

Also, Studdard is a great R&B singer. From originals, like “Sorry 2004,” to covers, like “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” Ruben Studdard knows how to bring heartbreak to life. It’s honestly a shame he didn’t become as a big a superstar as some of his Idol compatriots.

#1 Gone for the Days by Lee DeWyze (2024 - Season 9)

Lee DeWyze might have the quintessential post-American Idol career. After winning the contest in 2010, DeWyze’s first album sold 153,000 copies. A year later, RCA Records dropped him. His 2013 album sold 3,000 copies.

But Lee DeWyze is not like his fellow winners who have mostly abandoned music making despite their commercial prospects dwindling. He has continued to make play. DeWyze’s 2024 effort Gone for Days was released independently. And he seems to be better for it.

Without the need to work with professional songwriters and chase mass audiences, DeWyze has carved out a nice lane for himself, a singer-songwriter with stylistic similarities to other recent songsmiths, like Noah Kahan and Zach Bryan. No, Lee DeWyze is not a generational singer, but his voice remains strong enough that maybe he could have a surprise hit outside of the Idol machine.

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Hilbert’s problems drove a good deal of mathematical development in the last century, so the Clay Institute was hoping to follow in his footsteps. They added some extra motivation too: The correct solution for any of the seven problems came with a million-dollar bounty.

Thus far, only one problem—the Poincaré conjecture—has been solved. That is, until last week. Mere days ago, OpenAI announced that their frontier artificial intelligence model cracked another one, often referred to as Navier-Stokes.

This set off a firestorm in the mathematics community. Part of that firestorm was driven by the fact that two prominent researchers claimed that OpenAI stole some of the work from them. Another part was that mathematicians felt like artificial intelligence was destroying their vocation. Here is what UCLA professor Terence Tao recently wrote on the topic:

Over the last few months, the mathematical capabilities of LLMs have improved dramatically, to the point that they can solve major outstanding problems in many fields of mathematics. However, the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

In mathematics circles, Terence Tao is very famous. I’d venture that if you were to ask a random person on the street to name a living mathematician, the only name they might conjure—and “might” is doing a lot of work in this sentence—is Terence Tao.

Tao was a math prodigy, taking university-level courses at age 9 and getting his PhD at 21. In the years since, he’s won basically every mathematics prize, including the Fields Medal, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.” His abilities are probably best illustrated by fellow Fields Medalist Charles Fefferman once joking, “If you’re stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao.”

Even if math hasn’t been your thing since you learned long division, Tao’s words are easy to identify with. I’m sure there has been some AI-related technology that has troubled you over the last few years. Tao, an intellectual behemoth, is just being humbled like the rest of us pea-brained plebeians were much earlier. Right?

I don’t think so. Classing Tao’s response purely as an AI-induced meltdown isn’t fair. He’s getting at something much deeper, something that AI’s involvement in many other fields, academic or artistic, also touches on: The process is the point.

The way OpenAI’s involvement with Navier-Stokes left Terence Tao feeling is how Suno’s involvement with music making left me feeling a few years ago. Suno, as we’ve often discussed in this newsletter, is the artificial intelligence company that, among other things, lets you generate entire songs with just a text prompt. Ask for a silly gangsta rap song about a cat befriending a dolphin, and they will get it to you in moments.

I am not a professional musician, but I’ve been writing songs, releasing music, and playing in bands since I was in middle school. The idea of generating a song with the click of a button made me feel sick. Why had I spent a decade trying to improve my musical skills when artificial intelligence was going to run laps around me?

And, exceedingly, it looked like those laps would be run with the approval of the music industry. Though there are still scores of pending lawsuits, more labels and publishers are signing licensing deals with AI companies. Not long after the Navier-Stokes debacle, Suno announced their V6 model, which was trained on fully licensed music.

I am not against artificial intelligence. I am not even against artificial intelligence in music. The last century has taught us that even as new technology reshapes music, music remains. Yet Suno continues to upset me. In a recent post on Mastodan, Terence Tao, though talking about mathematics and artificial intelligence, incidentally captured why:

But modern AI tools, when directed without such expert supervision, can now be aimed all too easily at the ostensible goals of the field, without any incentive to take the slow, whimsical path. The flag is captured, the goal scored, and the problem is solved; but at the cost of lessons learned, insights gained, collaborations formed, and new targets located.

Mathematics is about solving problems. But it is also about process. It is about a way of thinking. It is about collaborating with fellow practitioners. Music is much the same. Yes, we want to make great songs. But the joys of music often come from the creative process, from working with our friends, from singing songs together. Optimizing musical output is a misunderstanding of why we write and sing songs.

Suno and its competitors don’t seem to get this. Even as I expect AI tools to become more integrated into the music-making process—just as they will become more integrated into the mathematical process—the idea of generating an entire song via text prompt continues to disgust me. The process, as I noted, is the point. And if we have completely eliminated the process, we have lost our way.

Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Along with getting access to our entire archive, subscribers unlock biweekly interviews with people driving the music industry, monthly round-ups of the most important stories in music, and priority when submitting questions for our mailbag. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

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Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief • Vinyl Specialist • Spotify’s Former Data Guru • Hall of Fame Songwriter• John Legend Collaborator • Broadway Arranger • Indie Label Founder• Fender Exec

Recent Newsletters: Two-Hit Wonders • The Lostwave Story • Forgotten Artists • Album Cover Colors • Bad Ways to Die • A Frank Sinatra Mystery • Slop Problems

Want more from Chris Dalla Riva? Get a copy of his book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves wherever books are sold.

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