8 days ago

Hey Soul Sister Album: Save Me San Francisco (2009)
50 Ways To Say Goodbye Album: California 37 (2012)
Drops Of Jupiter Album: Drops Of Jupiter (2001)
by Train

Joni Mitchell wrote a song about Woodstock without attending the festival, and Train lead singer Pat Monahan wrote Hey Soul Sister about Burning Man without ever setting foot in the Nevada desert.

Some of his friends were going, and he was intrigued by the festival, which culminates with a huge effigy set ablaze. Monahan imagined beautiful women dancing around the flames and came up with the lyric about an unforgettable girl who blows his mind.

Train had a hit in 2001 with "Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me)" and another in 2003 with "Calling All Angels," but then they derailed, with Monahan going through a divorce and losing a good friend to suicide. He poured his heart out on their 2006 album For Me, It's You, but no hits came of it, and the group went on hiatus.

When they returned to make their 2009 Save Me San Francisco album, they filled it with upbeat pop songs, the poppiest being "Hey Soul Sister," which was the first single. Train was once again on track and back on the charts.

According to Pat Monahan, he wrote Hey Soul Sister and "If It's Love" the same day in New York City after a few days of little sleep. Monahan says that when he doesn't sleep, he does better work, and when "Hey Soul Sister" came to him, it was quick and easy.

Since their name conveniently rhymes with "sister," in the chorus Monahan namechecks Mr. Mister, a group known for their hits "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings."
Musically, the special sauce in this song is the ukulele. "The ukulele made everybody happy," Monahan told PopEater. "I think that along with the song itself and the melodies, people gravitate towards that positive part of it. The ukulele made a big difference."

The Save Me San Francisco album was the first time Train brought in outside writers. "Hey Soul Sister" is a collaboration between Pat Monahan and the Norwegian songwriting duo Espionage, whose previous writing credits include "Irreplaceable" for Beyoncé and "With You" for Chris Brown. After working together on the writing and recording of the track "Brick by Brick," Monahan decided to record another track with Espionage. The Train frontman recalled to The Erie Times: "I said, 'I want to write an INXS-y song.' So, they started playing kind of an INXS-y song, and I wrote the song 'Hey, Soul Sister' to it and the melodies and started to sing it. And I was like, 'Man, this just doesn't sound great to me.'

One of the guys, Espin, who's like a huge star in Norway, picked up a ukulele, and said, 'Hey, how about this?' I was like, 'Are you (kidding) me?' And it made the difference. It made my words dance. It made sense. These words were meant to dance with ukulele and not guitar." This presented a problem as it meant Train guitarist Jimmy Stafford would have to learn how to play ukulele. Stafford recalled: "At first, I tried to do it by using a guitar pick, and it didn't sound right. I had to go online and Google a ukulele lesson and noticed they're not using picks at all; it's more of a flamenco style. Once I got that down, then it sounded like the real deal."

The album, which was produced by Martin Terfe (Jason Mraz, KT Tunstall) pays tribute to Train's hometown. Monahan told Billboard: "We owe all of our gratitude to San Francisco because they embraced us back when, if they hadn't have, no one would have."

Lead singer Pat Monahan told Billboard magazine that Hey Soul Sister, along with the rest of the album, marked a return to the group's folk-rock roots. He explained: "There's super catchy riffs and melodies in it, which I think are way more important that any production trick or great-sounding vocal production. It's kind of us going backward so we can go forward."

The Madonna reference in the line "I believe in you, like a virgin, you're Madonna" is to the Virgin Mary, not the pop star.

Hey Soul Sister reached #1 in a number of countries including Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Thailand. It was also a #1 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart.

The music video was shot outside of Chango, a coffeehouse on the corner of Echo Park Avenue and Delta Street in Los Angeles. The Olly Murs video for "Troublemaker" was also shot there.

Released before streaming caught on but long after CDs fell out of favor, "Hey Soul Sister" racked up a remarkable 6 million downloads, becoming the most-downloaded song in Columbia Records history.

Hey Soul Sister was covered on the ninth episode of the second season of American musical television series Glee, titled "Special Education." The show was premiered on Fox in the United States on November 30, 2010, and sees the glee club enter the Sectionals round of the show choir competition. This version features a solo vocal from actor Darren Criss, who plays Blaine, an openly gay teen from rival glee club the Dalton Academy Warblers.

Hey Soul Sister was the top-selling song of 2010 on iTunes. Katy Perry's "California Gurls" was the second-best seller and third was Eminem's "Love The Way You Lie."

Hey Soul Sister was skewered on Saturday Night Live in a 2024 skit set in 1955. Andrew Dismukes and Ego Nwodim play an interracial couple addressing their parents. Dismukes says he wrote a song "about what it's like to be married to a beautiful Black woman," and he launches into "Hey Soul Sister." The white parents enjoy the song; the Black parents, not so much, especially the line, "You're so gangster, I'm so thug."

The Kidz Bop version of "Hey Soul Sister" plays in the premiere episode of the 2025 Hulu series Good American Family, which tells story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born girl with a rare form of dwarfism who was adopted by an American couple. The song is used in a scene where the family sings along to it in the car, before their lives take a bad turn.

50 Ways To Say Goodbye follows a similar theme to Paul Simon's "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover," though in this instance it's the guy's pride that has been hurt as he looks for excuses to tell his friends why she's disappeared from his life. To save face, he tells them she's dead.

Train frontman Pat Monahan penned this song with Espionage, the Norwegian production duo that helped pen "Hey Soul Sister." Espionage is made up of Espen Lind and Amund Bjørklund and amongst their other credits are Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" and Chris Brown's "With You."

Though 50 Ways To Say Goodbye's title claims there are 50 ways to say goodbye, we can only find 11 lies about his farewell the protagonist tells, all involving his former beau's demise. They are:

1. Went down in an airplane
2. Fried getting suntan
3. Fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand
4. Met a shark under water
5. Fell and no one caught her
6. Caught in a mudslide
7. Eaten by a lion
8. Run over by a crappy purple Scion
9. Dried up in the desert
10. Drowned in a hot tub
11. Danced to death at an east side night club

The Mariachi influenced horns are played by Brad Magers, whose day job is the bass player for The Bronx. The Los Angeles-based rock band have also released two albums under their alter egos "Mariachi El Bronx," in which they play Mariachi music in place of their usual hardcore punk styles.
The song's melody has been compared by some reviewers to Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera."

In an interview with VH1, lead singer Pat Monahan revealed that he wrote Drops Of Jupiter about the death of his mother. Train released their first album in 1998, and were touring that year when Monahan's mom was dying of lung cancer - she was a heavy smoker. This was before the widespread use of cell phones, and Monahan made many stops to pay phones on the tour to speak with his mom during this difficult time. In December of that year, his mother died, and in early 1999 Train was working on their next album when their record company started pressuring them for a hit. Monahan returned to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, and woke one morning with the words "back in the atmosphere" in his head. Beginning a time of healing, he started to compose the song. Said Monahan: "Loss of the most important person in my life was heavy on my mind, and the thought of 'what if no one ever really leaves? What if she's here but different. The idea was, she's back here in the atmosphere."

He recorded a demo of Drops Of Jupiter and played it a week later for Donnie Ienner, who was president of their record company, Columbia. While Monahan wasn't sure how the song would go over, Ienner loved it and told him it was his Grammy song. He was right: It won Grammys for Best Rock Song and Best Instrumental Arrangement With Accompanying Vocalist. Ienner had Train record the song quickly so they could put it on the album and use it as the title track.

Why are there drops of Jupiter in her hair? Pat Monahan told Buzzfeed it was part of his vision: "My mother, she was able to swim through planets and turn them into whatever she wanted - they didn't have to be what we know them to be. So she actually had Jupiter in her hair, when she was talking to me."
Pat Monahan said of this song: "It was an obvious connection between me and my mother. 'Drops of Jupiter' was as much about me being on a voyage and trying to find out who I am. The best thing we can do about loss of love is find ourselves through it."

Train was in danger of becoming a one-hit-wonder before they released this. Their first hit, "Meet Virginia," was released two years earlier.
It was a few years before Monahan revealed the story behind this song, and the common interpretation is that it was about a woman who leaves her man to find out if they belong together. Monahan would give vague answers when asked about the song, at one point saying: "This is a woman who's strong and has to find out who she is and a man willing to let her do that."

This is the type of song which lends itself to personal interpretation, and was most often considered to be about a former lover, a young woman or just someone the writer knew who went on a voyage of self-discovery - not necessarily by traveling to distant lands.

When they suffer personal tragedy, many people feel a closeness to their departed loved one. This is not a song about reincarnation as such, but about the idea that no one ever really leaves us. In spite of the different subject matter, it bears a striking resemblance to the Cat Stevens composition "On The Road To Find Out." Whatever, it obviously struck a chord with many people, and deservedly spent over a year on the Billboard Hot 100.

Monahan said of the song: "It was an obvious connection between me and my mother. 'Drops of Jupiter' was as much about me being on a voyage and trying to find out who I am. The best thing we can do about loss of love is find ourselves through it."

Monahan has a permanent scar on his chin (from a car accident), which could explain the line, "One without a permanent scar."

Brendan O'Brien produced this track. He has also worked with Pearl Jam and The Stone Temple Pilots. He became interested in the band when he heard their cover of "Ramble On" on the radio.

Train performed an updated version of Drops Of Jupiter at the 2002 Grammy awards, which included a cello prelude by Denise Djokic and a full orchestra. When Train won the award for Best Rock Song, Monahan thanked his mother.

Drops Of Jupiter ascended to the top 10 of the Adult Contemporary chart in its 49th week, marking the longest climb to the top 10 on that tally by any act.

On December 25, 2009 Two and a Half Men actor Charlie Sheen was arrested on charges of domestic violence against his wife, Brooke Mueller. According to Us Magazine their Christmas Day brawl was caused by this song. Sheen allegedly told police that he and his daughter share a love for "Drops Of Jupiter," which angered Mueller. She lashed out, "You have a song [that] you share with your daughter, but not one with me?" which ignited the fight. Patrick Monahan responded to the news on Twitter, "I'm pretty sure that Drops of Jupiter is a positive part of Charlie Sheen and his daughter's relationship. Just gonna look at it that way."

Drops Of Jupiter returned to the UK singles chart in April 2012 after being performed by audtionee Phil Poole on The Voice.

The string section was arranged by Paul Buckmaster, who has done arrangements for Elton John, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones.

Train introduced the Drops Of Jupiter California red wine in 2011, boasting of its "soft, supple tannins." Yes, Train makes wine. Other varieties include Soul Sister pinot noir and Calling All Angels chardonnay.

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