Holiday songs for any weather

When it comes to writing tunes about the elements, artists blow hot and cold

Geoffrey Vendeville | The Toronto Star | p E3 | 22 December 2015.

Baby it's cold outside, but apparently not always in Christmas song lyrics.

Holiday songs mention the heat nearly as often as they do the snow, according to a recent study by British meteorologists who combed through pop music lyrics looking for references to the weather.

"Perhaps surprisingly, in Christmas songs in our primary list the word 'cold' is used less than one might expect, but instead is implied through idealistic Christmas images of snow," the authors say.

Take "Let It Snow," for example: "Oh the weather outside is frightful/But the fire is so delightful."

The only exception they found was the upbeat Christmas countryfolk single "Summer" by Australia's Sunny Cowgirls, which describes barbecues, jet-skiing and "runnin' round with the sprinklers on."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC6DobJ1elU

Sally Brown and her co-authors from the universities of Oxford, Newcastle and Reading didn't only study Christmas-themed music; they found 759 weather songs in a karaoke database, from "Good Day Sunshine" to "Blowin' in the Wind." (The majority of the weather songs, in fact, were by the Beatles or Bob Dylan.)

The researchers' aim was to investigate "how society portrays weather in music and the types of weather that inspire musicians." But they also just wanted to have a little fun, lead author Brown, a research fellow at the University of Southampton, told the Star.

It all started on a lark, she said. At a conference in 2012, the meteorologists played an icebreaker game where they listed weather-related tunes: "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," "Walking on Sunshine," "It's Raining Men" - the list went on. They had so much fun doing it that they continued in their spare time, between studying coastal geomorphology and experimental atmospheric physics, Brown said.

Out of the 190 songs that had weather as a primary theme, sun and sunshine were the most common references, followed by rain.

"All that summer/We enjoyed it/Wind and rain and shine/That umbrella, we employed it/By August, she was mine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It75wQ0JypA

They also found a correlation between certain weather references and the keys that a song is in. Mentioning the sun "significantly increases the probability" that a song is in a major key, while songs in minor or mixed keys are more likely to mention the rain. If a song in their database mentioned a rainbow, it was 100 per cent likely to be in a major key.

For some songwriters, the weather seems to have acted as their muse. George Harrison apparently wrote "Here Comes the Sun" after leaving a business meeting in April 1969 on the first sunny day of the year after a particularly dreary winter, according to the study. Meteorological records show that April was the sunniest month on record until 1984. When Harrison sang, "It's been a long cold lonely winter," he may have been speaking literally.

Whether they do or not, their experiment has already changed the way some of the authors listen to music.

"Last week, I was working away in a hotel and they had Christmas music, and I was counting the weather references," Brown said. "It was 'Frosty the Snowman.' It was quite funny."