What are the Weirdest Lyrics in a Hit Song? Mailbag

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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. Typically, the way this works is that I ask readers to send in questions that I will research. Today’s mailbag is different. Every question came from

Adam Mastroianni

. Mastroianni runs Experimental History, what I think you can make the case is the greatest newsletter in existence. It’s broadly about psychology, but I think that undersells how insightful and humorous it is.

Mastroianni and I met a few months ago at an event for people with newsletters. We’ve kept in touch ever since. At the beginning of July, he sent me the following email: “I keep meaning to ask you these when I see you in person, but I keep forgetting. No need to answer, just writing them down so I don’t keep thinking them over and over.” Adam, today’s your lucky day. I answered all of the questions. I want to say I did it because we are friends, but it’s mostly because they were all so interesting.

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If you dump all the lyrics into a big pot, which #1 songs are semantically farthest away from all other songs? Apparently “MacArthur Park” peaked at #2 or else that would be my guess.

This question almost broke me. First, I grabbed all of the lyrics to number one songs, vectorized them (i.e., turned the words into numbers), and used a method called “cosine similarity” to compare the lyrics between every number one. I then averaged the cosine similarities for each song and looked where the average was the lowest. That spit back “Da Doo Ron Ron” by Shaun Cassidy.

Originally done by The Crystals, Cassidy’s “Da Doo Ron Ron” is a bastardization of a pop masterpiece. Both versions are pretty standard lyrically. They’re about falling in love hard and fast (e.g., “I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still”). Something didn’t feel right about this answer.

The reason this came out on top/bottom was the nonsensical refrain. Almost no other songs contain the words “da doo ron ron.” Given that those words are repeated a million times in the song, it makes it seem lyrically unique when it is not.

My next attempt was a bit more sophisticated. I decided to lemmatize the lyrics. What this means is we take all different forms of a word and equate them (i.e., walking = walked = walk). This method still didn’t do well.

The most unique lyrics were apparently in “Alley Oop” by The Hollywood Argyles. This song is quite unique. It’s about a cartoon caveman that David Bowie would later quote in “Life on Mars”(i.e., “Look at that caveman go” → “Look at those cavemen go”). Still, this was clearly being driven by the fact that the nonsensical “alley oop” is repeated over and over throughout this song.

Still unsatisfied, I decided that instead of looking at all of the lyrics, I would just look at unique lyrics. So, if you repeated the word “Hello” 49 times in your song (i.e., “Hello Goodbye” by The Beatles), it would only be counted once.

Using the same tools, I got a new answer: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens. This felt pretty good. There aren’t many songs about lions sleeping. There was still a problem, though. There are only 17 unique words in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” By trying to remain unbiased against repetition, I became more biased.

I had one more idea. Let’s just look at number one hits with at least 50 unique words. You have over 1,182 number ones. 1,078 have at least 50 unique words. That’s most of them. If we compare unique words in each number one using cosine similarity, assuming the song has at least 50 unique words, we find what I think is actually the most lyrically unique number one: “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.

This makes sense. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is effectively a list of 40 years of people, places, and events. Sure, “fire” is mentioned in many number ones — 78, in fact — but Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, and Bernie Goetz are not mentioned in many.

You were onto something with “MacArthur Park,” though. While the Richard Harris version didn’t get to number one, the disco version by Donna Summer did. By the last methodology, it was one of the top 10 most unique number ones lyrically.

I assume this song came to mind because of the bizarre lyric “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” Because “cake” is a euphemism for the derrière, it’s been mentioned in a bunch of number ones. But there are three others that use it in the more traditional sense:

• “21 Questions” by 50 Cent ft. Nate Dogg: “I love you like a fat kid love cake”

• “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” by John Denver: “When the sun's coming up I got cakes on the griddle”

• “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel: “Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes”

Why does nobody talk about how the melodic riff in “Hush” by Deep Purple is the same as the melody after “I went into a dream” in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”?

I have never noticed this, which is especially astounding given that I currently play “Hush” in a cover band. It looks like this has come up on the Steve Hoffman Music Forum and The Beatles Bible.

Let’s start by reviewing the dates. “Hush” was written by Joe South and originally recorded by Billie Joe Royal in July 1967. “A Day in the Life” was recorded in January and February 1967 and released in May of that year.

While there isn’t a huge gap between The Beatles releasing their song and South writing his, I wouldn’t be shocked if it were lifted. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album “A Day in the Life” is found on, was incredibly influential. In fact, in late 1967 John Fred topped the charts with “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” a clear play on Sgt. Pepper’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” So, ripping pieces of Sgt. Pepper was par for the course for 1967.

Still, it could be a coincidence. There are only so many notes. Plus, almost everyone involved is dead, so we’ll probably never know. Frankly, the most interesting thing I discovered while researching this is that years ago there was a furious debate on the blog The Beatles Bible about if John or Paul sang the “aahs” on “A Day in the Life.” The debate got so heated that the thread had to be locked. I love the internet and Beatles’ freaks:

This thread is locked. It became possibly the most heated debate this forum has ever had, encompassing opinions, debates, mud-slinging, personality clashes and arguments.

Is the chord that goes with the AppleTV+ logo the same as the beginning chord of “Drops of Jupiter” by Train?

Yes. I confirmed this with my friend Ken: “It’s a simple C major. It’s kind of funny that they asked a musician to make the boot up sound, and they just sent back a C.”

How is it possible that Bruce Springsteen never had a #1 hit? How many artists are out there like that, meaning people considered superstars who never actually hit the top of the charts?

When artists brag about scoring a number one hit, they typically mean that they topped the Billboard Hot 100. The Hot 100 is Billboard’s pop chart that has been in operation since 1958. The chart is aggregated once a week, and things vary greatly by the week. This leads to an odd array of artists topping the charts and an even odder array who never did. Let me give you a more concrete example.

Imagine there are three artists: Superstar Sammy, Greenhorn Gary, and Novelty Ned. In week one, Superstar Sammy releases a great record that sells 1.2 million copies. During that same week, Greenhorn Gary puts out his debut single and happens to move 2.5 million units because he has a rabid fanbase of young women. Greenhorn Gary would therefore get the number one and Superstar Sammy wouldn’t.

Now, in week two, Novelty Ned puts out a ridiculous record that sells 200k units. In that same week, nobody notable releases anything. Novelty Ned thus scores a number one before Superstar Sammy, despite the fact that the former is forgotten shortly after his weird hit.

This is partially what happened to Springsteen. The Boss’s best chance at a number one hit was at his commercial peak during the release of Born in the U.S.A. That album scored 7 top 10 singles. “Dancing in the Dark” peak at number two. The problem? Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was out at the same time.

Another Springsteen specific issue is that he would give many of his more pop-oriented records to other artists. His “Because the Night” became Patti Smith’s biggest hit. His “Fire” became The Pointer Sisters biggest hit. His “Pink Cadillac” became Natalie Cole’s biggest hit. He also tried to give “Hungry Heart” to the Ramones but put it out himself when pressed by management. It became his biggest hit up to that point.

Springsteen is also part of a special trio of artists that wrote number one hits but only ever got to number two themselves. Again, Springsteen got to number two with “Dancing in the Dark,” but Manfred Mann’s cover of his “Blinded by the Light” topped the charts. (More on that in a moment.) The Byrds took Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” to number one even though Dylan himself only peaked at number two with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35.” Three Dog Night also took Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” to the top of the charts, despite the songwriter only getting to number two himself with “Short People.”

And, for good measure, I should note that the group with the most number two hits without ever getting to number one is Creedence Clearwater Revival. The rock legends had seven number two hits without ever reaching the musical promised land. Justice for John Fogerty!

Speaking of Springsteen, I once heard that said Manfred Mann’s cover of his song “Blinded by the Light” is more popular because they said “douche” instead of “deuce.” I guess this isn’t a question but more of a comment, really.

This is (classic) classic rock lore. And it does sound like Manfred Mann is singing “douche” instead of “deuce.” I don’t think that led to the song’s popularity, though. Though I love Springsteen and his original version of “Blinded by the Light,” the Manfred Mann version is just better in my opinion. The Springsteen version has a more demo-ish quality that didn’t really fly on the radio in the early 1970s.

In 2007, Manfred Mann told Record Collector that they knew about the douche-deuce issue, but when they tried to fix it, the recording was demonstrably worse. Sometimes you can’t fix magic:

I don’t think Springsteen liked our Blinded By The Light, because we sang “wrapped up like a deuce,” and it wasn’t written like that and I screwed it up completely. It sounded like “douche” instead of “deuce,” because of the technical process – a faulty azimuth due to tape-head angles, and it meant we couldn’t remix it.

Warner [Records] in America said, “You’ve got to change ‘douche’, because the Southern Bible belt radio stations think it’s about a vaginal douche, and they have problems with body parts down there.” We tried to change it to “deuce” but then the rest of the track sounded horrible, so we had to leave it. We just said, “If it’s not a hit, it’s not.”

When Elton John’s song “The Bitch Is Back” was popular in the 1970s, did they really say “bitch” on the radio?