Ages, dates, phone numbers, innuendos, memes, zip codes — there are many reasons to write a song about a specific number. For the last year I’ve been collecting them in a sprawling Spotify playlist called numbers. It was originally started as a challenge to see if Spotify’s recommendation AI could figure out the theme of the playlist (it can’t), but since then, collecting these songs has become a fun mini hobby, and numbers is now over 150 songs strong.

The playlist is still not even 10% of the songs that prominently feature numbers, and I expect it to grow in the future. Nevertheless, here are 10 curiosities from the first year of collecting.

−61

Negative numbers count too! For now, this is the lowest-numbered song that I think has enough significance to make it into the playlist. Besides being an incredible work of musical storytelling, it gained fame for being in the opening of the game Death Stranding 2. Personally, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t actually know about Woodkid nor this song until I found it while browsing for additions to the playlist.

1

There are currently 18 songs in the playlist associated with 1! It is by far the most popular number to show up here, since it has so many different lexical functions, all of which can become a pivotal part of a song lyric:

As for the top 1 song of all time? My pick would have to be

3.1459

bbno$ has a lot of songs about numbers. He recently announced he’s taking a step away from music due to his haters. That makes me feel a bit bad about what I’m about to say, but I’ll still say it, because I unironically enjoy his music and want him to do better. in my zone is one of the only songs in the playlist that features a non-integer, which makes it such a shame that the non-integer happens to be

Ayy, three-point-one-four-five-nine [sic], knock you out easy as pi

— Alexander Leon Gumuchian (bbno$)

The correct digits of $\pi$ would have rhymed just as well…

25

If I had a nickel for every song released during the third generation of K-pop that was sung by a second-generation female K-pop idol named Ji-eun about being 25 years old, I’d have two nickels and an idea for an epic mashup. You can look forward to that sometime next year.

28

Don’t tell me it’s sorted incorrectly; eight refers to the number 28, the age of both artists when they made the song. IU’s other “age series” songs are, as discussed above, Twenty-three and Palette. So why “eight” and not “twenty-eight”? The best explanation I’ve seen is that “eight” (transliterated 에잇) sounds like a Korean expression of “dammit”.

104

The Phineas and Ferb theme song.

There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation
And school comes along just to end it

— Jaret Reddick, Bowling For Soup

Erm, actually… that’s way more days than a typical summer vacation. Showrunner Dan Povenmire later clarified that this was meant to match the 104 segments (52 episodes, 2 segments each) in a standard Disney TV season.

Also, the same Dan Povenmire sometimes shows up as Dr. Doofenshmirtz at live performances of this song.

360

Aminé also has a remix titled 360.5, which would be an amazing inclusion in the playlist, but it unfortunately isn’t on Spotify.

500

But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand
Miles to fall down at your door

— Craig and Charlie Reid, The Proclaimers

Of course, Terry Fox didn’t walk 500 miles; the absolute legend ran 5373 kilometers on a single leg, raised the 2025 inflation-adjusted equivalent of $77 million CAD, and only stopped because he died.

2000

Two-thousand watts, eight ohms, two-hundred volts, real strong

— Michael Jackson

Forgive bbno$, even the King of Pop makes mathematical errors in his music. At $8\ \Omega$ and $200\ \mathrm{V}$, the formula $P = \frac{V^2}{R}$ (derived from Ohm’s law) means that you should actually have $5000\ \mathrm{W}$ of power.

Or does it? That calculation above assumes that “eight ohms” refers to static resistance. If your conductor is non-ohmic, then resistance separates into two measurements. The static resistance would be given by $R = \frac{V^2}{P}$, reflecting the total voltage and power. Meanwhile, the differential resistance $r = \frac{dV}{dI}$ could still be $8\ \Omega$, meaning that the next volt added would cause an increase of $0.125\ \mathrm{A}$ in current instead of the $0.05\ \mathrm{A}$ you could get if the resistor were ohmic.

This example of decreasing differential resistance actually occurs in things like fluorescent lights, which get better the harder they’re used. As for what device Michael Jackson was singing about?

His penis.

2025

I honestly didn’t have a song for 2025. All of the legendary “year” songs are still set in the 20^th century, like

• Bryan Adams — Summer of ‘69
• Neon Trees — 1983
• Max Coveri — RUNNING IN THE 90’S
• Prince — 1999

Meanwhile, the 21^st century zeitgeist has shifted to a collective dread of the present and future. The aughts are starting to appeal to mass nostalgia, but the teens still have a while to go. There are songs that refer to various 20xx years, but they lack longevity and widespread popularity.

If anyone did have to write a song about 2025, it should probably be an ironic clickbaity parody of some kind of classic hit like Bowling For Soup — 1985, that just changes the lyrics to stuff about brainrot and Labubus and

Perfection.

Footnotes