33 Fascinating Songwriting Stories - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 42)

Hey, I'm Andrew. I'm Michael. I'm Evan. I'm Sarah. Together we're the Gregory Brothers

And this is Mental Floss on YouTube. Writing songs can take a lot of work, and sometimes inspiration strikes at the most random times

And all you have on hand is a wedding invitation and a pen to write your thoughts down. At least that's what happened to Doc Pomas of the Drifters when he was writing Save the Last Dance Company

The lyrics encourage his girl to dance and have fun, but also to remember she's coming home with him at the end of the night

The song was written by polio-stricken Doc, who scribbled him down at his own wedding

after watching a line of able-bodied men dance with his bride, a Broadway dancer

And that's the first of many fascinating songwriting stories that we'll be talking about today

Let's start our playlist with Chris Christofferson, the renowned singer-songwriter slash history professor

slash janitor slash helicopter pilot who combined three of those five skills into one amazing songwriting pitch

In 1969, as Johnny Cash later recalled it, he and June Carter Cash were at their Nashville area home when a helicopter landed on their lawn

Christopherson stepped out of the chopper with a beer in hand and announced, I thought this might be the best way to get a song to you. Bring it right out of the sky

Christopherson, however, says that Cash wasn't even at home when the helicopter arrived

Either way, his song, Sunday Morning Coming Down, was a number one hit for Cash the following year

Christopherson isn't the only offbeat guy to write songs for the man in black. Shel Silverstein, yes, the children's author, wrote one of Cash's biggest hits

It's long been rumored, though not confirmed, that a boy named Sue was inspired by a friend of Silverstein's

who also had an ambiguous name. Gene Shepard, who wrote the book A Christmas Story, was based on and narrated the movie version

One of the greatest songs ever written was originally an ode to protein, written when a young Paul McCartney woke up with a little tune in his head and picked it out on the piano

until the real lyrics came to him quite some time later, Yesterday, All My Trouble Seemed So Far Away

McCartney made do with the nonsensical lyrics Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs

Speaking of mid-slumber song inspiration

On May 9th 1965 Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night with a riff in his head Instead of going back to sleep Richards dragged himself out of his bed picked up his trusty acoustic and recorded about 60 seconds of a guitar part

Those 60 seconds would become the basis for satisfaction. Upon hearing Bob Dylan's protest song, Blowing in the Wind, on the radio

Sam Cooke apparently exclaimed, geez, a white boy writing a song like that

leading to write A Change Is Gonna Come the following year. Bonnie Raitt's 1991 hit, I Can't Make You Love Me If You Don't

was inspired by a man who was in court for shooting at his girlfriend's car. The judge asked the man if he had learned anything, and the man replied

I learned, Your Honor, that you can't make a woman love you if she don't

But what's even more fascinating is that the song was written by former NFL lineman Mike Reed

who was the number seven draft pick in 1970. Between seasons, he was a pianist for various respected symphony orchestras across the U.S

He also won a Grammy for writing a country song in 1984, making him the only NFL player to do so ever, in all time, throughout the universe

In 1986, respected newsman Dan Rather was walking down Park Avenue on his way home when two well-dressed men randomly attacked him, repeatedly demanding to know the answer to the question, what is the frequency, Kenneth

The men fled into the night as a doorman came to Rather's aid. Once assailant William Tager was arrested and identified by Rather, the disturbed man admitted that he mistook the news anchor for the vice president of the future

I have made that same mistake. a politician apparently named Kenneth Burroughs. Michael Stipe was perplexed by this odd event, calling it the

Premier Unsolved American Surrealist Act of the 20th Century, leading him to write What's the Frequency, Kenneth

Another rip from the headline song is Heartbreak Hotel, popularized by Elvis

The song was co-written by May Boren Axton and Tommy Durden. Durden found his inspiration in a newspaper article about a man who committed suicide

whose suicide note read, I walk a lonely street. Many people tried to find a deep, hidden meaning in Cream's white room

due to its mysterious lyrics, such as, in the white room with black curtains near the station

Writer Pete Brown once expresses astonishment that the song was a hit, saying, it was a miracle it worked

considering it was me writing a monologue about my new flat. Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple came about

when the band was at a Frank Zappa concert in Switzerland. Someone in the audience shot a Roman candle into the ceiling mid-show

causing a massive fire There were no injuries but the building burned down to the ground As the members of Deep Purple sat in their nearby hotel room while firefighters tried to thwart the flames they noticed Lake Geneva was completely engulfed in a haze Smoke on the water of course

Even The Who writes to impress critics sometimes. When they were writing Tommy, Pete Townsend played some of it for music reviewer Nick Cohn

Cohn told Townsend that the God stuff was passe and dull. But knowing that Cohn was a fan of pinball

Townsend asked what if Tommy was a pinball champion? Cone perked right up so Townsend

added it in, reworked some music, to incorporate the pinball theme. Townsend later called it

the clumsiest thing he ever wrote. For decades, no one knew who Caroline of Neil Diamond's 1969 hit, Sweet Caroline, was

Nearly 40 years after its release, Diamond finally revealed that he was simply struck

by the innocence of a picture he saw in a magazine while on tour in the 60s. A little

girl riding her pony. The girl? Caroline Kennedy. Diamond was able to tell his muse this story

when he played the song for her at her 50th birthday party in 2007

Murderous cult leader Charles Manson wrote a song for the Beach Boys? It's called Cease to Exist, with uplifting Manson-esque lyrics like

Submission is a gift, go on, give it to your brother. The boys turned it into a song called Never Learned Not to Love

keeping the submission is a gift lyric. At a Chinese restaurant, Paul Simon saw something called

Mother and Child Reunion on the menu, a dark reference to a chicken and egg dish

Having recently experienced the death of the family dog, Simon had death on the brain and connected the reference in the dish's name to his wife dying

And so Mother and Child Reunion was written. Harry Nilsen wrote the song One is the Loneliest Number after trying to call someone and getting a busy signal

For those of you who have never heard a busy signal before, it sounds like He stayed on the line and used a signal tone while writing, and that tone became the opening notes of the song

Eminem's Academy Award winning song Lose Yourself was written and recorded on the set of 8 Mile

He had a studio on set and apparently recorded all three verses in one single session

Booyah. He was described by his co-workers as a very hard worker, which may be why he slept through the Oscar ceremony

Eric Clapton wrote Layla after one of his friends gave him a copy of The Story of Layla and Majnun, a Persian story about unrequited love from the 12th century

But who was his unrequited love for? George Harrison's wife. After she divorced George Harrison and married Eric Clapton they got divorced too Eric Clapton and George Harrison made up and went on tour together Hey Jude started as Hey Jules a song written by Paul McCartney for Julian Lennon

who was going through a difficult time because his parents were divorcing. Julian didn't even know until like 20 years later

Michael Jackson wrote Billie Jean while driving. He claims that his car lit on fire while driving on the highway

because he was so enamored with the song as he was writing it. A motorcycle luckily drove past Jackson and alerted him to the car trouble

Hey, your songwriting is lighting your car on fire. Nirvana didn't like Smells Like Teen Spirit when Kurt Cobain first played it for them

So he forced the group to play the riff for an hour and 30 minutes. Eventually, inspiration struck and the group was convinced that the song would work

after deciding to slow the tempo down a bit. The late, great Ray Charles' song, What I Say

came from a moment of improvisation at the end of her performance when he had no songs left to play but 12 minutes left in the concert

Before writing it on the spot, he said to the orchestra who was accompanying him

Listen, I'm gonna fool around, y'all just follow me. Let's go through some songs written about people you may have heard of

Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know was written about Fool House's Dave Coulier, Uncle Joey

Back to December by Taylor Swift was written as an apology to Taylor Lautner, more cryptic than the song Tim McGraw about one of her favorite singers

Bruno Mars claims that he wrote Locked Out of Heaven about Halle Berry. The song Me and Mr. Jones by Amy Winehouse is about rapper Nas

Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters wrote I'll Stick Around about Courtney Love. Billy Joel's hit, Uptown Girl, was written about model Elle McPherson

Post-divorce, Katy Perry wrote Wide Awake about comedian Russell Brand. Black Velvet by Alana Miles is about Elvis

Actress Rosanna Arquette, inspired both In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel as well as Toto's Rosanna

Clearly Toto is a little less subtle. Thanks for joining us for another Mental Floss on YouTube, which is made with the help of all these kind people

We're the Gregory Brothers. If this video made you hungry for more songs, come check out our channel here and after you're like, I really, really, really like it, we put some strength over here

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