My Book is Getting Published
Let me tell you why it took 7 years to make it happen
As the title to this post says, I’m publishing a book. This hasn’t been a secret in the last week, but I wanted to announce it formally because part of the reason that Rowman & Littlefield agreed to publish it is because of this wonderful community that has cropped up around this newsletter. The book will be called Uncharted Territory. It’s an off-beat, data-driven history of popular music from 1958 to 2025. It should be out this fall.
Today, I want to give you a preview of what this book will be like, along with explaining why this newsletter is called Can’t Get Much Higher. That name has a deep connection to the book.
My Book is Getting Published
By Chris Dalla Riva
After graduating college, I spent a few years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts while I worked at an economic consulting firm. I learned many great skills at that job, but it often left me creatively unsatisfied. So, I came up with a ridiculous quest. I was going to listen to every song to every top the Billboard Hot 100.
The Hot 100 is Billboard’s pop chart, and it launched in August 1958. Since then, it has been published once a week with 1,177 songs making it to the number one spot. If I listened to one song per day, it would take me over three years to complete the task. Long time? Sure. But as a songwriter and an amateur pop music historian, I was intrigued.
The first song was “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson, the onetime teenage sensation who starred in his family’s ABC sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The song was a trifle, informed by both the rock and doo-wop traditions but with all the edges sanded off. Still, I was hooked.
Each day, I’d come home from crunching numbers about potential mergers and acquisitions, sit down with my guitar, and listen to whatever the next hit was. A couple weeks in, I mentioned it to my friend Vinnie. He said he’d do it too. Each day, we’d share a couple texts about the song and then rate it out of ten. Given that I spent my days working in spreadsheets, it felt natural to shove those ratings into one.
But I’m neurotic. So, this spreadsheet of song ratings began to grow. I added the length of each song. The people that wrote them. The label that put them out. And so much more. By the time I got to the 50th number one, Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-in-Law,” I felt like I noticed some weird trends. I wrote up a few pages and shipped it off to an English professor from college that I remained friendly with.
He loved it. And I knew he wasn’t just being nice. He’d always been incredibly honest in the past. With his words of encouragement, I pressed on. A few pages of writing ballooned into a few chapters. Not long after, I felt like I had the makings of a book. Though I had no idea how to get a book published, I figured I needed a name. That’s when I came across an article in the same magazine whose charts I was listening to.
In 2018, Billboard published short piece about how Paul McCartney’s latest release had topped their album chart. The title included a funny turn of phrase from the British tunesmith: “Paul McCartney Reacts to ‘Egypt Station’ Topping Billboard 200: ‘You Can’t Get Much Higher Than No. 1’.”
McCartney was correct. You cannot get any higher on Billboard’s charts than number one. I was using data to write about number ones. And McCartney had composed a bunch of them. That phrase felt like an apt title for my book: Can’t Get Much Higher.
One problem. Nobody wanted to publish it. It’s a tough to sell a book when you have no audience. A cold email led me to
, a one-time writer for ’s website FiveThirtyEight. “You should try to publish a few articles,” Walt told me. “It’s easier to get a book published if you’ve done that.”This led to making a TikTok page and a million article pitches. One of those pitches turned into an article on
’s Tedium that went mega-viral. That virality led to articles in a bunch of other magazines. At the same time, my TikTok page had grown to over 100k followers.Still, nobody would publish the book! The data-and-music angle was just too out there. So, I decided to start a newsletter. I slapped the proposed name of my book on my new endeavor: Can’t Get Much Higher. And despite misgivings from potential agents and publishers, people liked it. One of those people was Fred Bronson.
When it comes to number one hits, Fred Bronson is a legend. Along with spending decades as a journalist, he wrote The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, a tome that chronicles each song to ever top the charts. Bronson saw a TikTok I posted about the criminally underrated number one “Want Ads” by Honey Cone. That led him to my newsletter. I reached out. He eventually put me in touch with his editor at Rowman & Littlefield. They wanted to publish the book, albeit under a different name (i.e., Uncharted Territory). I was still thrilled. Seven years of effort was worth it.
So, What is Uncharted Territory Going to Be Like?
Over the next couple of months, I will publish pieces of Uncharted Territory in this newsletter. I will also give you a heads up when it is available for preorder. But today I want to give you a preview of what interesting pieces of musical history we can uncover with data. And we’ll start with one chart: the average length of a number one hit from 1940 to today.
In many ways, this chart feels innocuous. There are ebbs and flows in song length, but they really aren’t that large. Over 85 years, the average number one hit wavers between 2 minutes and 4.5 minutes. Nearly every popular song falls within those bounds. And creative expression will naturally lead to variation. Not that interesting, right?
Wrong! Beneath this trend sits entire histories. From the 1940s through the 1960s, pop music was stuck in the range of 2.5 to 3 minutes because the single couldn’t hold much more sound without degrading. As the technology improved throughout the 1960s, we began to see longer hits, like “Hey Jude.” In the 1970s, this technological innovation was coupled with the fact that labels started to release physically bigger singles to accommodate the proliferation of disco remixes.
With a multitude of formats available by the mid-1980s, the single found its proverbial groove around 4 minutes. And it stayed there for decades. But things changed around 2010. Suddenly, the average number one single fell to around 3.5 minutes. This is strange. In the streaming age, aren’t artists unshackled from the constraints of physical media? Sure. But at the same time the financial model of music streaming incentivizes shorter songs for bigger payouts.
I could go on. Like I said, histories lurk in this chart. Not just histories of artistry but histories of technology and business. Throughout Uncharted Territory, I ruminate on trends like this between 1958 and 2024. Here are a few things that we touch on throughout the book:
Why were artists obsessed with singing about death in the 1950s?
Did popular song lyrics become more complex after Bob Dylan splashed on the scene?
Why is classic rock radio so racially segregated?
How did corporate mergers between record labels change cover art forever?
Which obscure 1990s rap hit accidentally predicted the future of the music business?
Why were songs so sad in the 2010s?
Is it a problem if there are too many songs?
And these questions are only the beginning. Within each chapter we not only touch on odd trends and unexpected tales, but we dive deep into what music of each era sounded like and which songs were the best and worst at that time. I don’t want to say much more. But I’m excited to share a presale link as soon as it goes live.
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I am beyond ecstatic for you!!
Congratulations from a fellow author. Good books can take a long time to get off the ground. Sounds like you have a winner on your hands now and a good publisher too. Shout out to Fred Bronson for seeing the potential and not craving it for himself.