Hey Jude, Are Song Titles Showing Up Later?
Hey Jude, Are Song Titles Showing Up Later?
Chris Gunther stops by to investigate an unexpected song-titling trend
A few weeks ago, an upcoming writer named Chris Gunther reached out to me with an interesting theory. He claimed that song titles were appearing later in songs. Here’s an example he gave me. The Rolling Stones’ classic “Angie”, released in 1973, starts with Mick Jagger intoning the title. Compare that to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire”, a piano ballad from 2023. It takes 132 words before Rodrigo reaches her title. Of course, those are just examples. Gunther claims that’s part of a larger trend, though. I’ll let him explain.
Songs Get to the Point, Titles Don’t
Growing up, whenever my dad and I were in the car together we would play the classic game of guessing the name of the song (and band!) on the radio as fast as we could.
As a child of the 1960s, garage band drummer in the 1970s, and London ex-pat in the 1980s, my dad introduced me to classic rock in those radio games: Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Ramones, Sweet, Fleetwood Mac, and of course, The Beatles.
Because my dad knew most of them from just a few notes, I learned to be quick to identify these songs. But I also noticed that a lot of the songs seemed to sing the title just seconds into the lyrics, at which point the game was over and we'd change channels to go again.
I still play this game whenever I'm listening to the radio, by myself or with friends, and noticed that today I seem to have a bit more time before the title is sung. Which made me think, are song titles showing up later in song lyrics than they used to?
Yes.
The chart below shows the number of words you have to sing before getting to that song's title on average for every year since 1955. I had a hunch the general trend would be more words over time, but even I wasn't expecting such a dramatic shift.
In the 1950s and 1960s, most songs got to the title within 20 words. In four of those years, the average title appeared within the first 10 words, hitting a low of just 4 words in 1961. Here are some examples from that period.
“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley (1956): “You ain't nothin' but a hound dog”
“Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen (1963): “Louie Louie, oh no, you take me where ya gotta go”
“Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra (1964): “Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars and let me see what spring is like on a-Jupiter and Mars”
“Do You Believe in Magic” by The Lovin’ Spoonful (1965): “Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart? How the music can free her whenever it starts.”
“Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues (1967): “Nights in white satin, never reaching the end, Letters I've written, never meaning to send”
“Hey Jude” by The Beatles (1968): “Hey, Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better”
Some of this is related to song structure. During this era, many songs followed the 32-bar song form, sometimes denoted the AABA song form. As the name suggests, these songs usually have two sections, often denoted “A” and “B”. The song’s title is usually found in a refrain, or short-repeated line, at the beginning or end of the A section, thus earlier in the lyrics. In the 1950s, 1 in 4 songs I looked at started immediately with the title. Today, that number is less than 1 in 20.
That change is partly due to the verse-chorus song form supplanting the AABA song form in the 1970s. In the verse-chorus form, the title usually appears later in the song, namely in the chorus. The percent of Billboard #1 hits with a chorus spiked from 40% in the late-1960s to 70% in the early-1970s. The trend in title placement continued as well: 1969 saw a big jump to 33 words before the title appeared in the lyrics. From there, the title began to drift deeper into the lyrics, before leveling out at around 50 words in 1990.
What about songs where the title isn't sung at all? Think “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel. Traditionally, these made up just 5 to 10% of popular songs. That percentage dropped to less than 5% from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. The trend has since reversed, as it's become more popular to name a song after something other than a lyric. Artists making music that is typically characterized as contemporary rap or R&B have driven most of this trend. Jay-Z doesn't sing the title on nearly half of the songs I looked at. Artists like Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Drake, Chris Brown, and Usher often avoid it as well.
The title is the quickest way fans can identify songs, so this naming trend may indicate an artist’s increased trust in their fans’ ability to find their music even if they don't hear the title while listening. Finding good music has certainly become easier in the last few decades with streaming, Shazam, and the closer connections artists can have with their fans on social media.
This could explain why, even after the verse-chorus form had been fully established, the title has continued moving back. After a long plateau at around 50 words the average number of lyrics before the title appears has started ticking up again since the mid-aughts. It passed 60 words in 2010 and hit an all-time high of 71 in 2024. This trend is particularly interesting when you contrast it with the fact that popular songs have become shorter. Artists might want to catch people’s attention quickly, but it’s clear that the song title isn’t required to do that.
Deep Dive: The Beatles vs. Taylor Swift
Let’s compare two of the most popular artists across time, namely The Beatles and Taylor Swift, to understand this trend a bit more. On average, The Beatles take just 13 words to reach the title in their songs. Taylor Swift takes 75 words. That’s almost six times longer. That’s particularly astounding given that her average song is only 1.4 times longer than the average Beatles’ song.
The Beatles wrote 52 songs that started with the title (e.g., "Yesterday", "Help!", "Hey Jude"). That's over 20% of songs in their catalog. Only 9 of Swift's (<4%) start with the title (“Untouchable”, “Today Was a Fairytale”, “When Emma Falls in Love”, “Don’t Blame Me”, “Gorgeous”, “I Think He Knows”, “betty”, “Dear Reader”, “So Long London”).
Who's writing these lyrics?
Taylor Swift has written all of her 232 songs, though some are cowritten with the likes of Jack Antonoff (~25% of her songs), Aaron Dessner (20%), and Max Martin (10%).
The Beatles songs have been pretty evenly split between Paul McCartney and John Lennon with a few by George (13%), Ringo (3%), and others as well.
On Swift's songs, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner seem to like getting to the title earlier than the pop star, while Max Martin hides the title farther back. But all of them are still 4 times later than any Beatles writer.
Let's close out with one final example showing that song titles are now later in lyrics than before, and that the radio name game is getting more lenient.
In the 472 combined Beatles and Taylor Swift songs from their main discographies, they have 1 name in common. Can you guess it? Close your eyes if you want to guess.
The answer? “Tell Me Why”. The Beatles version of “Tell Me Why” from A Hard Day's Night starts with the title. In Swift’s identically-titled song from Fearless, it takes 112 words for her to ask why.
This week’s story was brought to you by Chris Gunther. Gunther is strategy consultant who uses his Excel skills for good: writing data-driven stories about sports, music, and pop culture for his website.
He’s the author of the forthcoming book, Skytown, a history of the Chicago Sky that recounts the team's 15-year journey to a WNBA championship, with random & fun musings along the way.
If you want to chat about anything he’s written you can reach him at chrisgunther.writes
Chris 1 and Chris 2: Data is nice, but what's the context? The Beatles started in an entirely singles-sales industry, so people needed to know the title of the song to ask for at the record store. Top 40 radio ruled a monoculture in which everyone listened to the same songs, and radio DJs announced and then back-announced the name and title of each song. The 1970s audience fragmented, and the knock on disco was that some songs consisted of nothing but the title, repeated. ("Boogie Oogie Oogie" to "Stayin' Alive" and "Fly Robin Fly.") I don't know if Chris G. has spotted a trend, or is just jammin' on numbers. Since streaming, the Billboard charts are almost useless, since artists load up on tracks declared "singles" and monopolize charts that only a contortionist could comprehend. But writing is about telling stories, searching for meaning. The data don't move me, daddy-o!
As usual, good article. Hey, sometimes they don’t even mention the title of the song at all, as with Pearl Jam’s “elderly woman sitting behind the counter in a small town.“
I’m reasonably sure the record companies tried to get artists to get their title upfront and out there pretty quick so listener would have something to latch onto. Now that record companies aren’t calling the shots anymore with the same amount of leveraging power, artists are doing whatever they want, and in my opinion, sometimes to their own detriment. Really, wouldn’t you want your listener to know what the name of your song was? So they could find it, tell their friends? Why would you work against yourself?
The big record companies certainly have and had a lot to be criticized for, and I could make quite a speech about that. That said, they knew how to market, and they encouraged their artists to follow basic craft. Think about it: if you were a journalist writing an article for a newspaper, you would start with a headline, then an introduction, then a main body of facts, then a conclusion. Would it make sense to start with your conclusion, or your main body of facts and end with the headline? there’s a reason kids right there book reports this way all the way up to major newspapers or Chris’s article we all read.
When we use that as an analogy to compare to the craft of song writing, the title identifies the subject, announces it in a matter of a few words. The chorus (or refrain) is an extension of the subject, represents the primary theme of the song, what it’s about. (Think of Yellowstone Sabrina among 9 trillion others.) Typically the verses tell the story in chapters. As one professor used to tell me, “the chorus is a string which holds together all the pearls.” (verses)
Is all this the morphing of the craft of songwriting, the songwriting process, or is it the deterioration of it? Or perhaps both? I suspect.. both. Personally, I prefer craft.
Now there are some who would argue that craft is limiting, the 12 measures of a blues, the 16 measures of a ballad or 99% of the country songs you listen to. Haiku is a structure. Limericks are a structure. I don’t think those structures limit your creative potential, they simply offer a form that is recognizable and familiar to the listener or reader. What you PAINT upon the canvas is important, not the canvas itself and certainly not the size of it. (Think the Mona Lisa.)
Rather than ever looking at craft as a preordained conglomeration of constructs that limit, I see them as challenges. And boy they sure do help separate the wheat from the chaff. Yeah, most blues tunes are 12 measures and 3 chords. That said, you really get to see what somebody’s got pretty immediately because the form itself is so simplistically basic.
Sorry to go off on a few related tangents, but I think they all connect. Don’t even start me on bridges!