SongChart

Chart #369: The most sarcastic songwriter in America was handed the word "friendly," and Randy Newman wrote the sweetest song of his career.

YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME - SongChart September 25, 2026 -- Chart #369 Hello Music Friends, This past June, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Taylor Swift finished playing her new Toy Story 5 song and then called an 82-year-old man in glasses to the piano. They'd rehearsed for about an hour. Randy Newman's only worry was the key. The s...

Five key changes, a hum to find the pitch, and a piece of paper under the strings for drums — Johnny Cash built "I Walk the Line" out of a tape recorder mistake he made in Germany. This week's chart tells you how it happened and how to play it without needing a capo and a compass.

I WALK THE LINE - SongChart September 18, 2026 ----- Chart #368 Hello Music Friends, The strangest chord changes in country music were composed by accident, by a tape recorder, in Germany. In the early fifties, Airman Johnny Cash was stationed with the Air Force overseas, and some of his buddies borrowed his reel-to-reel. When...

Tommy James wrote "Crystal Blue Persuasion" while reading the Book of Revelation. The rest of 1969 figured he'd been reading something else entirely, and forty years later Breaking Bad cooked up the ultimate misunderstanding. Post #367: the real story, plus a two-chord chart that sounds better the quieter you play it.

CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION - SongChart September 11, 2026 ----- Chart #367 Hello Music Friends, Every so often a songwriter sits down and writes a hymn, and the whole world decides it's a drug song. Tommy James wrote "Crystal Blue Persuasion" with a Bible open on his lap. It was 1968, and James -- the same fellow who gave the world

SongChart Blog post #366 takes on John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” a fine little anthem for anybody who ever argued with the rules and was shocked to discover the rules had better lawyers. It’s loud, rebellious, wonderfully stubborn—and proof that fighting authority is usually more fun than beating it.

Post #365. A song for every day of the year, and this one's about the day after.

"Layla" was Clapton chasing Pattie Boyd. "Old Love," written with Robert Cray twenty years later, is what came after the chase — a man trying to live in a house that still smells like someone else.

Never released as a single. Then he sat down with an acoustic on MTV Unplugged and turned it into something quieter and harder to shake: the Journeyman version is a man arguing with a memory; the Unplugged version is a man who quit arguing and started living with it.

Full story and the chord chart here 👇

OLD LOVE - SongChart August 28, 2026 ----- Chart #365 Hello Music Friends, No woman in the history of rock and roll ever got better songs out of her men than Pattie Boyd. George Harrison married her and wrote "Something." Eric Clapton fell for her while she was still married to his best friend and wrote "Layla," which i...

This week’s SongChart takes on Cat Stevens’ beautiful and timeless “Father and Son,” a song that captures that age-old tug-of-war between youthful dreams and parental wisdom. It’s simple, emotional, and still hits home more than 50 years later. Give it a listen, grab the chart, and maybe call your dad — or your son.

FATHER AND SON - SongChart August 21, 2026 ----- Chart #364 Hello Music Friends, The most famous father-and-son conversation in popular music is not about a father and son. It's about the Russian Revolution. I'll give you a minute with that one. In 1969 Cat Stevens was writing a musical called Revolussia, set in 1917 Russia,....

In 1968 Herb Alpert asked Burt Bacharach a great question: got a song in a drawer somewhere that never got the right recording? Burt reached in and pulled out a tune about a guy who thinks his girl is cheating. Hal David rewrote the lyric, Herb sang it to his wife on a CBS special -- the first time America ever heard him sing a note -- and the switchboard lit up with people demanding a record that did not exist yet.

A month later it did. Four weeks at No. 1. First chart-topper for Herb, first for A&M Records, and the first American No. 1 for Bacharach and David.

THIS GUY’S IN LOVE WITH YOU - SongChart August 14, 2026 ----- Chart #363 Hello Music Friends, Herb Alpert had a question he liked to ask great songwriters, and it's a beauty: is there a song tucked away in your drawer somewhere -- one that never got the right recording -- that you still find yourself whistling in the shower? He put that

Poco spent a decade watching former members leave and become stars—then the guy who wasn’t supposed to sing wrote their biggest hit in about 30 minutes while paneling a wall. This week’s SongChart is “Crazy Love,” complete with placeholder lyrics that wisely never got replaced, a surprising Phil Hartman connection, and one of the great “finally!” stories in rock and roll.

CRAZY LOVE - SongChart August 7, 2026 ----- Chart #362 Hello Music Friends, Rusty Young was hired to be the guy in Poco who didn't sing. That was the deal. He played the pedal steel, the banjo, the dobro -- all the instruments that make a country-rock band sound like a country-rock band and none of the ones that

Here's a great tune from 1967, revived for a second life by The Commitments, but make no mistake, it was James Carr who put the soul in this one. Enjoy post #361:

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Fats Domino made heartbreak swing; Cheap Trick plugged it into an amplifier and made it roar. This week’s Chart of the Week looks at how one deceptively simple song became a rock-and-roll classic twice.

AIN’T THAT A SHAME - SongChart July 24, 2026 ----- Chart #360 Hello music friends, Welcome back to another edition of Chart of the Week. This week we are going all the way back to the early days of rock and roll with one of the greats. Today’s feature is “Ain’t That a Shame” by Fats Domino. And before we are