Our next numbered song is one of the unlikeliest hits of the 80s, British electronic artist Paul Hardcastle’s spoken-word Vietnam war anthem ’19.’
Inspired by a documentary on PTSD, Hardcastle sampled news reports and interviews over a bed of electronic music, centered around the (possibly incorrect) statistic that the average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19.
The ’31 Numbered Songs’ series reaches adulthood with ’18,’ a 2014 track from One Direction’s fourth album, appropriately titled Four. How many numbers can I get in one sentence?!
This song was written by Ed Sheeran (with Oliver Frank) for the band at the request of Simon Cowell. It wasn’t released as a single, but Niall Horan’s pronunciation of “chance” as “chonce” launched a thousand fan memes.
Many of these numbered songs are named after ages, especially once I hit the teens. Alessia Cara’s ‘Seventeen’ is a more upbeat approach to the territory Taylor Swift mined in ‘Fifteen.’
This is a better video than song, using some clever camerawork to age Cara from childhood to middle age over the course of one bus ride.
I’ve featured only one K-POP (Korean pop) song on my blog — Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style,’ which at the time was the most-viewed video on YouTube. ‘Gangnam Style’ has since dropped to number four on that list, unseated by new #1 ‘Despacito’ (approaching 5 billion views!) as well as Wiz Khalifa’s ‘See You Again’ and Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You.’
K-POP band OH MY GIRL, abbreviated as OMG, are a few billion views shy of Psy. Their top video clocks in with five and half million views, which still ain’t shabby.
As with Big Star’s ‘Thirteen,’ I knew exactly which song I’d feature for today’s number before I even started looking. Taylor Swift’s ‘Fifteen’ is lovely and iconic and certainly the best song ever written with this title.
Swift is also in contention for slot #22 with, you guessed it, ’22,’ but I have decided to go with only one song per artist, so somebody else will get the nod in a week.
Meet Me In Montauk 