How Did a Song about Pregnancy Top the Charts? Mailbag

This month we dive into questions about The Beatles, American Idol, the Grateful Dead, and many more

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025.

Today’s newsletter is another mailbag edition of Can’t Get Much Higher, or the newsletter where I answer reader questions. This month we cover questions about a weird number one hit in the 1970s, why we stop discovering music in our 30s, and if The Beatles made everyone else write their own songs, among many others.

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Related to your post a while back called “How Many Artists Did the Beatles Kill,” can you investigate what percentage of songs for each year were written or co-written by the performing artist? I'm interested in if (and how much) The Beatles as a self-contained performing and songwriting unit may have changed things on the songwriting front. - Mark

Great question. I write about this extensively in chapter three of my forthcoming book. I’ll give you a sneak peak, though. I have a dataset of every Billboard number one hit from 1940 to 2025. In that dataset, I track if the performing artist has a production or songwriting credit. Since the 1960s, we have seen a monumental increase in artists who have a songwriting credit on their songs. The Beatles surely influenced that given that the rate rockets up during the height of their fame.

At the same time, this trend began a decade before The Beatles topped the charts in the US. In that sense, The Beatles are part of a longer rock ‘n’ roll tradition where artists are expected to be involved in writing their own songs. Because of that, I think they are given slightly more credit than they deserve for this transition. Again, you can read a more extensive treatment of this and how it’s connected to a licensing disagreement in the 1940s in chapter three of my book. Jump to the section aptly titled “It Took Me Years to Write, Will You Take a Look?”

We know that the 1974 chart topper “(You’re) Having My Baby” is nauseating. What are your thoughts about why this song made it so big, and are there any other slimy #1 hits in this vein? - Catherine

If you haven’t heard it, Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby” is a curious musical artifact. Filled with somewhat creepy lyrics like, “The seed inside you, baby, do you feel it growing?”, you’re right to wonder how something like this became popular. When you look a bit closer, it’s not that strange, though.

• Relatable: Lots of people have babies. It helps when millions of people can listen to your song and relate to it on some level.

• Controversy: Released in the wake of Roe v. Wade and at the height of the women’s liberation movement, the song incited some controversy with Anka being named “Male Chauvinistic Pig of the Year” by Ms. magazine. Controversy sells!

• Sonic Palette: The instrumental in this song makes perfect sense for the soft rock bonanza that was the 1970s.

• Artist Popularity: After falling off in the 1960s, Paul Anka was having a bit of a career revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Above all else, I think the most important thing about this song is that even if you hate it, it’s easy to find yourself belting at least one “YOU’RE HAVING MY BABY” when the chorus comes around.

All that said, I think there are far worse number one hits. I’ll just focus on those related to gender. In “Honey,” Bobby Goldsboro’s wife dies, and he doesn’t even seem that upset about it. In both chart-topping versions of “Go Away Little Girl,” the narrator begs a woman to get away from him for fear he will cheat on his current partner. Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-in-Law” is just 2.5 minutes of hate for his wife’s mother (i.e., “Satan should be her name”). And Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy” contains the insane lyric, “If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life / Never make a pretty woman your wife / Cause from personal point of view / Get an ugly girl to marry you.” After listening to those, you’ll practically be begging to hear more Paul Anka.

Has my distaste for today's music faded from the exciting 1980s underground scene because the music itself is just not the same or could it be due to the way music is conceived/created today? - Pat

Frankly, it’s probably both of these factors. As my friend

Daniel Parris

has written extensively about, most people develop a taste in music in their teens and then stop discovering new music in their 30s.

Credit: The New York Times

At the same time, music is written, recorded, and promoted in very different ways these days than it was in the 1980s. These technological changes likely also explain part of why your tastes have stagnated. I think hip-hop provides a good example of this.

Hip-hop music is very different from earlier popular musical forms in how it’s created and sounds. First, hip-hop is made by sampling older recordings. In many ways, the approach is sonic collage. Second, hip-hop is based more on lyricism and rhythm than melody and harmony. If you spent decades listening to artists produce music with traditional instruments built around hummable melodies, then hip-hop will probably confuse you. Similar trends likely affect how you’ve experienced other genres since the 1980s.

Recently, I asked a bunch of people the following question: “If you could go back and listen to one song for the first time again, which song would it be?” What would you answer? - Tia

Impossible question. But here are a few songs that come to mind when thinking about this for a minute. All of these left me thinking my life wasn’t the same after hearing them for the first time. “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen. “On+Off” by Maggie Rogers. “Over the Rainbow” by Ella Fitzgerald. “Sixteen Blue” by The Replacements. “Ribs” by Lorde. “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by The Beatles. “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone. “There’s a Mother Always Waiting at Home” by Johnny Cash. “I Was Young When I Left Home” by Bob Dylan. “Worst That Could Happen” by Brooklyn Bridge. “All My Friend” by LCD Soundsystem. “Summer, Highland Falls” by Billy Joel. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by The Platters. “Baba O’Riley” by The Who. “The Load Out/Stay” by Jackson Browne. “Miss the Mississippi and You” by Jimmie Rogers. “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson. “I’m a Fool to Want You” by Frank Sinatra. “So Sick” by Ne-Yo. “All Falls Down” by Kanye West. “Blue Jeans & White T-Shirts” by The Gaslight Anthem. “Merry Go 'Round” by Kacey Musgraves.

How exactly does money work for a nationally touring band like the Dark Star Orchestra? They only cover the Grateful Dead and even recreate entire shows. I have wondered about this example and many others who also do covers. - Eddie

Musically, there aren’t many barriers to starting a cover band. Songwriters are owed royalties when their songs are performed in public. The good thing for artists is that it isn’t their duty to pay those royalties. It’s the venue’s duty. So, Dark Star Orchestra can play whatever they’d like. The venue will pay a performance rights organization (e.g., ASCAP, BMI), who will ultimately pay the relevant songwriters.

The only possible complexities are if they are using the original band’s name or likeness. That will likely require a licensing agreement with the group. Additionally, there are complexities if you want to put out recordings of your shows, especially on a CD or vinyl. That requires a mechanical license, which can be a headache to deal with at times. That said, if you just put your covers on streaming services, it’s up to the service to pay out the relevant royalties.

Are there specific companies that specialize in picking cover songs for current artists? I heard Jack Blocker sing “Always On My Mind” on American Idol and was floored. - Jeff

This is what music publishers do! Publishers represent songwriters, and their goal is getting their songwriters’ compositions into the world. Getting artists to perform songs in their publishing catalogue is a great way to do this. Furthermore, if an artist is young, it’s possible that the label will put some pressure on them to record certain songs.

Since some songs seem to be spending a year or more in the Top 40 these days, do you think Billboard is doing a disservice with its current methodology to determine its Hot 100? Shouldn't they cap songs at a certain number of weeks on the chart and allow other songs/artists to have a chance at some time in the sun? - Dan

Billboard already has (somewhat complex) rules around this. There’s a wonderful Reddit post that explains the nitty gritty details, but here is one of the rules: “With this came the first Hot 100 recurrence rule: should a song chart for 20 weeks and chart below #20 any week after the 20th week, it will be removed from the charts.”

If the goal of a chart is to highlight the true most popular songs in any week, then Billboard shouldn’t care about charts being stagnant week after week. But it’s clear the Billboard isn’t just after that. Newness has always been part of what Billboard is tracking for the industry. Because of that, I think we are due for some rule changes. I’ll leave it to the experts to figure that out.

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoy my work, please consider ordering a copy of my forthcoming book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that follows my journey listening to every number one hit from 1958 to 2025.