Tag Archives: 31 Numbered Songs

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Song of the Day #3,547: ’21’ – Hunter Hayes

The ’31 Numbered Songs’ project reaches drinking age with ’21,’ a track from young country phenom Hunter Hayes’ third album, The 21 Project.

Hayes released seven singles to streaming services before compiling them in a 7-song EP. He then released two new versions of the collection, one featuring acoustic versions and one featuring live versions of the same songs. He wanted to both give his fans a glimpse of how songs evolve from conception to performance and stretch the boundaries of how country music is distributed. Pretty heady stuff for a then-24 year old.

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Song of the Day #3,546: ‘”20″‘ – Travis

Today’s track was one of the initial inspirations for my ’31 Numbered Songs’ series. I’ve been a big fan of this song since I first heard it nearly two decades ago and at one point I considered making it the kick-off track of a 2-week series on songs numbered 20 through 29. Fortunately, I didn’t jump the gun and we all got to discover some obscure rap artists in the 1-10 range.

I discovered Travis’ “20” as a hidden bonus track on the band’s acclaimed sophomore album, 1999’s The Man Who. It’s one of three hidden tracks that are each as strong as anything on the album proper.

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Song of the Day #3,545: ’19’ – Paul Hardcastle

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.

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Song of the Day #3,544: ’18’ – One Direction

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.

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Song of the Day #3,543: ‘Seventeen’ – Alessia Cara

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.

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