Some Like It Hot Some Like It Cold

Songwriters are frequently inspired by the sun, the rain, and blizzard; a new study that analyzed 750 popular songs referring to weather has shown. Beatles’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and The Hollies ‘Bus Stop’ are some songs that were inspired by actual weather events the study says.

Over 900 songwriters or singers have written or sung about weather, the most common being Dylan, followed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

‘We were surprised how often weather is communicated in popular music, whether as a simple analogy or a major theme of a song,’ said the lead study author Sally Brown from the University of Southampton in Britain.

Brown, along with researchers from the universities of Oxford, Manchester, Newcastle, and the University of Reading analyzed the weather through lyrics, musical genre, keys and links to specific weather events. Frequently, songs mentioned more than one weather type, indicating a range of emotions. Some songs mentioned up to six weather types such as ‘Stormy’ by Cobb and Buie.

‘Our study also found that references to bad weather in pop songs were statistically more significant in the US during the more stormy 1950s and 1960s than the quieter periods of 1970s and 1980s,’ Brown said.

Weather-related songs are very popular, with seven percent of them appearing in Rolling Stone’s (2011) top 500 list of the Greatest Song Of All Time.