1. The first commercial CD pressed in the United States was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.
2. Bob Marley gave songwriting credits on “No Woman No Cry” to his childhood friend Vincent Ford, who ran a soup kitchen in Jamaica. Royalties from the hit song helped keep the kitchen running.
3. Simon and Garfunkel bickered nonstop while recording “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Garfunkel wanted Simon to sing it (“I’m sorry I didn’t,” Simon has said), and Simon never liked Garfunkel’s closing “Sail on, silver girl” verse.
4. The iconic whistle in “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” was improvised when Otis Redding forgot what he was supposed to sing during the outro.
5. Michael Jackson was so absorbed in writing “Billie Jean” on a ride home from the studio one day that he didn’t even notice his car was on fire. A passing motorcyclist alerted him—saving the King of Pop and one of the world’s catchiest tunes.
6. Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the tune to “Yesterday” in his head but not the lyrics. The placeholder words he worked with: “Scrambled eggs … oh, my baby, how I love your legs …”
7. The BBC banned Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” during World War II, worried its “sickly sentimentality” would lower the morale of homesick troops.
8. Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” was written by … someone else (on-again/off-again Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, to be exact).
9. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was the most-requested radio song of the ’70s. Yet singer/ lyricist Robert Plant once pledged $1,000 to a public radio station that promised to never play it again. (“I’ve heard it before,” he later said.)
10. The dude in Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks like a Lady)” is Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil, whose long blond locks Aerosmith mistook for a woman’s at a bar one night.
11. The Caroline in Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” is none other than Caroline Kennedy, whom Neil saw in a magazine photo in the ’60s. “It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” he recalled.
12. The chord that starts Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” is a tritone—known as the devil’s interval and banned from some Renaissance church music for sounding too evil.
13. Number of songs Elvis Presley recorded: more than 800. Number of songs Elvis Presley wrote solo: zero. (He earned a few cowriting credits.)
14. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was written by … a boy. Philadelphia singer Robert Hazard wrote and recorded the original version four years before Cyndi Lauper made it a hit.
15. “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (listed by American Film Institute as the greatest film song ever) is about a girl lifting herself up from rural Kansas but also about America rising up from the Great Depression under FDR’s New Deal, of which song cowriter Yip Harburg was a supporter.
16. Queen and David Bowie wrote “Under Pressure” in one night (then got pizza).
Sources: rollingstone.com, songfacts.com, historyofinformation.com, prx.org, elvis.com, mentalfloss.com, theguardian.com, britannica.com
