I could see this as a song that can help someone move on from a breakup, or perhaps get through losing someone in their life. A definite recommendation, Drops of Jupiter is a song that everyone should give at least one listen to. Thanks Danny. Wow, ? Seems like just yesterday I heard it for the first time. How did you discover the circumstances of why Monahan wrote it? Certainly seems to explain the sensibility of the song. I can remember the summer of , and first hearing this song on the radio, its a really beautiful song.
Should be awesome! Great post! This is such a great song. I always associate it with my older brother because it was his favorite song when it came out when we were kids. Health News.
Music News. National News. Politics News. Sports News. World News. In Crisis News. S2N Test Feed. And on that song he got away with it in a really big, Grammy-winning way. With the lyrics set, the music came next. It started with the title of the song and it doesn't say it again after that.
It had a sort of bridge. It wasn't a traditional arrangement. It didn't have an ending. It's a piano-driven song, and up to that point on the record most of the keyboards were played by either me or Rob, who was the guitar player at the time.
I did a lot of the heavy lifting, but we needed to get a real piano player to play this because I don't know if I can hold the line on this. And I know the guy we needed to bring in. And since none of us were really piano players, I suggested, "Well, we got Brendan O'Brien to produce the record, and who thought we could do that?
Let's get Elton John to play the piano on this song. That would make it a Train song featuring Elton John doing basically an Elton John song at that point. I'm not sure that would have had the same impact. Nobody wants to disappoint the guy who used to play in the Allman Brothers and now plays for the Rolling Stones. And I felt so proud of myself because I was right about him. He has such a bounce and swing in his playing. He was absolutely the best choice you could ever want to play piano on your record.
Nothing else had been recorded yet and we all just looked at each other and smiled. You could just sense the magic already. But Ienner was also committed to his original idea of bringing in Buckmaster to orchestrate a string arrangement. It just seemed to me like the exact right thing to do. We built the track and then we had Paul come in to orchestrate it.
He was thrilled that I had suggested him for this, because he didn't really know about Train. If I'd seen Almost Famous even just a week later? I don't know that I would have immediately thought of Buckmaster. But everything happens for a reason.
Every break in that song where a string arrangement would have been, I knew Paul would have filled it with a credible, deep, dark, sort of minor-chord arrangement the song needed. It was all magical lyrics, and you needed to have a balance between light and dark, and I thought Paul would give it the dark side and lift it. Paul is not with us anymore [he passed away in ], but he was a super-weird, quirky guy and his brain just knew how to make classical instruments make pop music tremendously better.
We tried him on a couple of other things, but the magic was really on "Drops of Jupiter. That's just the way Paul worked. He was very [ laughs ] — he had a very creative process and needed a lot of input and a lot of discussion about what was going to happen. And then actually doing the session took a while to put together the string section, and then the postproduction and mixing and everything. It cost a lot of money to make that song because we had to hire an orchestra and there was a lot of pressure on — "This is going to be the single that we're going to either sink or swim with" — so it took longer than usual.
And then he did the string arrangement on this song, and a year or so later he was nominated for a Grammy and he won Best String Arrangement. I was really happy for him, that after all that great work that he had done in the '70s that he'd never been recognized for by the Grammys, he finally got a Grammy with us.
That was really special. It's such a weird thing to talk about, but it does create so many feelings. I just remember tearing up when the string arrangement was being recorded because this was so much bigger than me. I don't know how to process this kind of love and attention that all of these people would be trying to help me express this one moment. It was pretty massive and a big deal for me because I don't come from much. It sounded like a hit to me. When the band listened to the final version of the song for the first time, they knew they'd struck gold.
Had the song that I wrote with Pat been the single, we probably wouldn't be talking right now. Just chills. I turned it up as loud as I could. Anybody that was in the building I had walk into my office and played it for them. I must have played it 50 times that day, and I got more into it, and I never got tired of it.
It's one of those magical moments that you work your entire life for. MONAHAN: The challenge was then how do you get a four-minute ballad with strings on the radio at a time when Justin Timberlake was popular, "Beautiful Day" was a big rock song, Alicia Keys had a big song out… It was difficult to get this four-minute ballad on the radio, but that wasn't my job.
I played them the song and there's not one person that I spoke to that didn't completely flip out when they heard it the first time. Not one. So I didn't anticipate any issues, but you just never know what the public's going to end up thinking. I just announced it as a song that was going to be on the next album. It was the only song we have ever played that no one's ever heard before where they stood up afterwards and they were like, "Holy s That song.
I did not expect that. It started doing well on pop radio, which we weren't really counting on, and it started doing very well kind of everywhere. And it just kept going. What mattered to me was I wanted to get to Europe, I wanted to go to Germany and Paris, and this was the way to do it. We were seeing trends in Europe that were moving in a positive way, and that affected me more than anything.
That's all I wanted: How do I go see people in Glasgow? This was the only way, and it worked. They weren't really selling elsewhere in the world until "Drops of Jupiter," and then they sold everywhere around the world, in all the English-speaking territories. It was a top song almost weirdly immediately. This was the beginning of the internet and our band website was getting a lot of emails from Van Halen fans wanting me to die because they all thought I was singing "Van Halen is overrated," instead of "and that heaven is overrated.
It was pretty awesome. The other thing that people still get wrong is that I don't say "fall from a shooting a star," I say "fall for a shooting star. When I have a song about the death of my mother, I also have to make it a love song, and the idea of falling for somebody else who you thought was better. It gets misinterpreted so much.
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