What is the most successful song title of all time?
I recently heard an interview with pop sensation Olivia Dean, where she claimed to try and find song titles that have never been used before. For an artist who largely sings about love and romance, this is one mighty task she has undertaken.
But she claimed to have achieved it with ‘Let Alone The One You Love’, which, for all intents and purposes, is exactly original. But maybe that’s because she has steered back into tradition with her latest campaign, representing something soulful and antiquated with her music.
It’s something that has arguably been missing in the past two decades of art. Through modernity, art and namely music, has tried to be as unique as possible. Band names like King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizzard and Psychedelic Porn Crumpets are commonplace, while album titles like I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It show the industry’s desire to be as creative and different as possible when it comes to titling.
It’s a valiant attempt at innovation that’s for sure. But as always, rebellion seems to fall away for normality. In fact, let’s take that latter album title as an example. It was the name of The 1975’s sophomore record, which is relatively unsurprising given how contrarian Matty Healy desperately tries to be. Now, if you track the titling of their records, they seem to continually follow in that vein, with sprawling names of hyper specificity. But the rumour mill has proven that they have finally buckled and are planning on calling their upcoming record Dogs.
No matter how hard we try, commonality is always waiting in the shadows, ready to push us back into our place and prove that nothing is that original after all. Let’s also not forget that this is a band whose major hits are ‘Chocolate’, ‘Sex’ and ‘The Sound’, which all separately fall into the category of most commonly used song titles in history.
The former two more so, because of their one-named title. As you look through the list of most successful song titles in chart history, most of them are similarly one-word titles.
So, what is the most successful song title of all time?
One-word names seem to be the way to go. Unsurprisingly, ‘Stay’, ‘Home’ and ‘Crazy’ all feature pretty heavily within the rankings, but none of them top the word ‘Angel’ with 11 appearances in the top 40. Used across a myriad of song titles, it seems to be the go-to word for artists who are looking to write a song about love and motivation.
But the most recent example of chart success from the song title was from The Corrs in September 2004. In their case, the song was a very direct tribute to their mother, who sadly died five years prior to the song’s release. The band explained, “’Angel’ lyrically is basically like a conversation with her. It’s a very optimistic song, really, because within it, there’s an absolute blind faith that she’s in a better place, and it’s basically like what’s it like there”.
