I'm in Can't Get Much Higher!

How I successfully pitched to my favorite music data blog

“Someone pour me out another shot of whiskey.”

These aren’t just the words that begin the anthemic chorus of singer-songwriter Shaboozey’s breakout smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” They’re the revealed demands of the American pop music audience in 2024, a year of many massive, charting, whiskey-related hits.

I first tracked this trend listening to top 40 radio with my friends while driving through Memorial Day traffic. We had already heard “A Bar Song” a bunch of times that weekend, both from the radio and by choice, when our station played Hozier’s “Too Sweet,” (“I like my whiskey neeeeeeat”) into Beyonce’s “Texas Hold’em” (“Rugged whiskey ‘cause we survivin’/ Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passing time, yeah”), into Zach Bryan’s “I Remember Everything” (“Rotgut whiskey’s gonna ease my mind”). “Man,” I thought. “That’s a lot of whiskey! There must be something going on in pop music with whiskey right now.”

I sought to back up this anecdotal hypothesis with hard data. So I scraped the websites of Genius and Billboard, and created a dataset of the lyrics of (almost) every song on each week’s Billboard Hot 100 chart from 2000 on. I have big plans for this dataset. It contains universes within its 100,000 rows, and answers to the pressing, existential questions of our time, like “Do songs that include five syllable words chart better than ones that don’t?” or “What is the bowl-oriented fast casual lunch spot of choice in the pop music industry right now?” or “What is Beyonce’s favorite color?”.

But first, I had to find out was up with all these whiskey songs. Are there always tons of charting whiskey songs? Did there used to be even more? Or was there something distinctive about the 2024 charts, whiskey-wise? It turns out there was, and you can read all about what I found in Can’t Get Much Higher, musician and data scientist Chris Della Riva’s blog on trends and analytics in the pop music industry.

I’ve been a big fan of Chris’s writing ever since I came across this short, hilarious breakdown of the Theseus’s Ship phenomenon in old, touring rock acts like AC/DC, some of which cycle through bandmembers enough times to end up with an entirely new roster, or even two rosters fighting over which one can claim to be the real one. I subscribed immediately, and have since been treated to some excellent analysis of the history of curse words in pop songs, the currently defunct bands most likely to put together a reunion tour, the misuse of punctuation in artist names, and of course, a precise metric of just how successful Taylor Swift is right now. I also enjoyed his account of his process writing and recording his newest single “Late Nite Kicks,” which was in heavy rotation in my family’s car this summer.

Here was my pitch to Chris earlier this week:

Hi Chris,

My name is Eli Miller, I'm an NYC-based data researcher, and I'm a huge fan of your substack. I'm obsessed with pop music, and I love how your writing both takes that obsession very seriously, while also playfully gesturing at the absurdity of it all. And you use data in an incredibly smart and accessible way, rigorously defining the parameters of your question, mining through massive amounts of information, plucking the two or three exciting findings out, and then coming up with clever (and brief) bits of analysis and context for those findings. It's all really impressive work, and I frequently annoy my friends (who care less about pop music) by forwarding your substacks from my email with all caps messages "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!

Okay, onto my pitch. 2024 was a banner year for whiskey in charting hits, most obviously in Shaboozey's "A Bar Song," Hozier's "Too Sweet," Beyonce's "Texas Hold'em," and Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves's "I Remember Everything." But just how unprecedented was this? With data I scraped from Genius and Billboard from 2000 on, I can show that pop music whiskey had two dramatic inflection points (one in March of 2023, another in January of 2024) both in the number of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 that reference whiskey, and in their success and durability. In a ~2000-word essay, mimicking your style as best I can, I would go into more detail on the 2024 whiskey songs that drove this trend, place them in the context of charting whiskey songs (as compared to beer songs and "a drink" songs) from 2000 to the present, and then speculate on a few underlying dynamics and possible theories of why we had such a moment with whiskey last year.

Here's my personal blog so you can get a sense of my writing. And here's a piece I wrote for Vulture on a Taylor Swift setlist forecasting model I made in the Spring of 2023, which is probably the most similar project I've done to this one.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thanks so much, and thanks again for your writing, it's really awesome.

Best,

Eli Miller

Chris responded a few hours later: “Let’s do it.” And after a few rounds of edits and notes, the final version is out today and I’m really happy with it!

Finally, if you’re new here and just clicked through from that piece, welcome! My name is Eli Miller, I’m a 25 year-old data researcher, and I blog about ghosts, including the ones that haunt Taylor Swift, the New York Yankees, and the eleventh-biggest song of 2024. I’ll have some more whiskey content out tomorrow.