Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was the number-one single on the Billboard charts for 2014, and by any measurement you choose it was the most commercially successful song of that year, with 13.9 units sold. If there was ever a song that could be called an “accidental hit”, “Happy” fit the bill perfectly. It innocently inserted itself into the world’s collective consciousness as (in the words of Dr Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University Of Arkansas) the new “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
What makes “Happy” so catchy? There are many factors, and they all serve as powerful reminders to songwriters about success in music:
- It’s got earworm qualities. An earworm is a song that gets installed in your musical brain, and doesn’t want to leave. Earworms need to be repetitive and simple. Repetition drills it into the listener, and simple ensures that they’ll remember it.
- It’s fun. And you only need to watch the video to see that it’s fun to sing, and fun to move to. Successful songs don’t necessarily need to contain a huge “fun factor”, but it’s hard to think of an earworm that’s not a lot of fun to sing. It hit number one several times, each time boosted by iconic live performances.
- It’s inclusive. The subject matter — being happy — is so engaging, it makes everyone feel that the song was written for them!
- It crosses several musical genres. It’s pop, it’s bluesy, it’s R&B, and songs like that are able to appeal to a much wider audience than those that target a single common genre.
- It has a one-size-fits-all, completely non-judgmental message. It doesn’t really matter what your state of mind is. If you’ve been down, up, hard on yourself, lost your way, been through good times, bad times… it’s a song for you.
What makes “Happy” the quintessential “accidental hit” is the simplicity of it, and the difficulty we have in placing it in a clear genre. Rather than sounding like a song that serves the adherents to any one musical style, it catapults itself into an intangible genre you might call “People Music.”
To write people music, music that grabs attention by being fun without being preachy or profound, remember the following:
- Keep the message simple. Appeal to basic emotions like love, peace and happiness.
- Keep the music simple. Simplicity makes it immediately attractive, and easy to remember.
- Keep the tempo mid-range or faster. The human body moves easily at the tempo chosen for “Happy”, and I don’t believe that was accidental. Even bad dancers can move easily to that kind of tempo.
- Use repetition as a main organizing feature. Write a chorus where words repeat, phrases repeat, chords repeat, and the whole thing is just FUN.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.