It isn't only the Brits who talk endlessly about the weather. On the American side of the pond we're every bit as likely to invoke the meteorological – especially during unnerving spates like April's heat wave in Washington, D.C., the recent deluges in California, and the horrendous floods and tornadoes that just ripped through the nation's midsection.
Weird weather inspired a story the other day in the New York Times that pondered the veracity of the old saw "April showers bring May flowers."
One noticeable spin-off of all the talk about the weather is that the barometer known as popular music has responded with soundtracks for almost any condition: Thunder, lightning, wind, sun, and lots of rain – or "Rain," to mention the title of just one of The Beatles' many paeans to precipitation, as in "Penny Lane": And the banker never wears a mac in the pouring rain. Very strange!
Whenever rain falls in Southern California, at least one generation of drought-hardened denizens can't help but chuckle at the inevitable replay in their minds' ear of "It Never Rains in Southern California." But no matter what your age or climate zone, odes to wet weather can readily seep into your consciousness – from 20th-century classics like "Singin' in the Rain" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," to The Who's epic double entendre "Love Reign O'er Me," to romantic staples like James Taylor's "Fire and Rain," to The Carpenters' melancholy "Rainy Days and Mondays," to the gentle patter of guitars and thunderclap of drums in Led Zeppelin's "The Rain Song," to the sonic drenching of Peter Gabriel's haunting "Red Rain," to Garbage's angst-splattered "Only Happy When It Rains." (As it happens, this soggy sample playlist is about equally split between U.S. and U.K. artists.)
The rainy trend in pop music had hardly skipped a beat when, early in this century, Rihanna came along with "Umbrella," fifty-five years after Gene Kelly giddily tap-danced into cinematic history with his.
Over the past decade alone – ever since Ms. Fenty made it nearly impossible to open an umbrella without also uttering ella, ella – the appearances in song of rain and other atmospheric phenomena have shown no signs of letting up. Consider a recent hit like "Sweater Weather," by The Neighbourhood (a Southern California band, despite the Anglophilic o-u-r), with its chilly echoes of that winter's day the Mamas and the Papas memorably crooned about more than four decades earlier in "California Dreamin'."
You may wonder, as Creedence Clearwater Revival did, "Who'll Stop The Rain"? Let's just say, well, "Here Comes The Sun." Because, as it turns out, songs featuring sun, sunshine, and sunny days are slightly more numerous in the popular English-language songbook than those about rain.
Or at least that's among the findings of a recent (and possibly continuing) study by a team of meteorological-minded British scientists, most of them affiliated with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Southampton. They took a breather from their usual focus on daunting issues like rising sea levels to wade into some mildly whimsical social-science waters.
"When I was undertaking the research and told people about it, the normal reaction was for them to laugh, ask why, and then suggest a song themselves," says Dr. Sally Brown, a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton specializing in coasts and sea-level rise. Brown is also a member of the Tyndall Centre and was the lead author of "Is there a Rhythm Of The Rain? An analysis of weather in popular music," a paper published in Weather, a monthly Royal Meteorological Society magazine, in July 2015.
"I think everyone underestimates how connected we are to the weather, and it’s a subject that we can relate to," Brown says. "I’ve had interest in the paper from all over the world."
Brown and her five co-authors are all in their thirties, born as the dark and spooky (but not stormy) refrains of "Thriller" began filling the airwaves. The scientists scoured their own mental jukeboxes, brainstormed and consulted other sources, ultimately drawing up a list of 759 songs with references to some form of weather, either in their titles or lyrics, that had been released by the end of 2012, the cutoff for consideration.
For the purposes of their analysis, they opted to rely on KaraFun, a karaoke database that provided both a sizable and searchable catalog – some 15,000 songs at the time of the study that's grown to 27,000. KaraFun didn't have all 759 songs on the researchers' list, but the site did include 419 that could be analyzed for details such as the types of weather represented: blizzard, cloud, cold, fair, fog, frost, haze, heat, hurricane, ice, mist, rain, rainbow, seasons, snow, storm, sun, thunder, tornado, and wind. Also examined in the study are such particulars as the use of major and minor keys, mimicry and onomatopoeia, and whether the weather is a primary or secondary aspect of a song.
It is this analysis that shows sunshine slightly eclipsing the rain, unless you factor in other forms of stormy weather, as found in a classic like – you guessed it! – "Stormy Weather."
The study also affirms what the lay listener might sense to be true: The Beatles did indeed produce a lot of meteorological music, a seeming nod to the notion that the United Kingdom rules when it comes to talking, or singing, about the weather. But the true king of weather pop appears to be Mr. "Blowin' in the Wind" himself, Bob Dylan.
Also considered was the extent to which actual weather trends may have played into the musical mindset since the mid-20th century. In the U.S., for example, references to foul weather in pop songs were significantly more likely in the stormy 1950s and ’60s – a period that included hurricanes Betsy, Hazel, Carol, Donna and Carla – than in the relatively placid ’70s and ’80s. The opposite seemed to be true in Great Britain, so no easy answers, but climate scientists are accustomed to reckoning with such puzzling evidence.
And the study authors acknowledged that some pertinent pop may have dodged their Doppler – not on the list, for example, is the aforementioned Who song, "Love Reign O'er Me," perhaps because of its homonymous spelling.
Also missing, at least rain wise, are "Save It For a Rainy Day" (Stephen Bishop), "Can You Stand the Rain" (New Edition), "Candy Rain" (Soul For Real), "Acid Raindrops" (People Under The Stairs), "A Day Without Rain" (Enya, although it's an instrumental), and "Rain Man" (Eminem, although it scarcely has anything to do with precipitation, literally or figuratively, so perhaps it shouldn't count; then again, "Ice Ice Baby" made the list, as did a few others with "little to do with the weather, due to the dual meanings of meteorological words," as the authors pointed out). "Brown Eyed Girl" (Van Morrison), "Drift Away" (Dobie Gray) and "Seaside Rendezvous" (Queen) were left off, though all have scattered rain in their lyrics. One missing tune that unquestionably belongs on the list is country singer Gary Allan's "Songs About Rain."
Because such omissions were inevitable, and because the scientists forecast a steady flow of weather-infused songs after the study's cutoff date – like "Sweater Weather," for example – they set up a site online where anyone can add qualifying tunes to the list, a continuation of the crowd-sourcing they did as part of the original compilation process.
About 125 songs have been added, and the dozen or so missing titles just mentioned might further contribute to this sonic science, along with a few others released after the study that haven't yet made the crowd-sourced list, like "Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)" (Gary Allan, again), "Echoes In Rain" (Enya, again), "U Only Call Me When It's Raining Out" (Gnash), "Raining Love" (Kyle), "The Rains" (Henry Jamison), "Raining Day" (Trinix), "Hope It Starts Raining" (Hunter Phelps), and "Standing in the Rain" (Action Bronson, Mark Ronson, and Dan Auerbach, on last summer's Suicide Squad soundtrack).
There are, it seems, at least a few compositions from decades past that could still be added to the sunny side of the ledger – like "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine" (Patti Page, Elvis Presley, Dean Martin, 1950s), "Come to the Sunshine" (Van Dyke Parks/Harpers Bizarre, 1967), "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" (Roy Ayers, 1976), "Behind the Sun" (Eric Clapton, 1985), not to be confused with "Behind the Sun" (Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1987), "Walkin' on the Sun" (Smash Mouth, 1997), "Around the Sun" (R.E.M., 2004), "Hail Rain Or Sunshine" (The Script, 2014, eligible for several categories), and at least a couple of very recent releases, "Sunshine" (Charlie Heat & Ant Beale, from their new album, called No Rain No Flowers, incidentally), and "Darling," in which the New Jersey band Real Estate gently alludes to "warm sun."
Brown says she and the others may re-crunch the updated numbers someday, time (and weather) permitting. If they do, it seems as though they may find a deeper pool of songs with rain than with sun. However, Brown theorizes, "If climate change means days with more extreme temperatures that are particularly high and memorable, we may have more songs about heat and sunshine."
Or maybe more like Phil Collins's "I Wish It Would Rain Down."