Surprising Origins Behind Famous Song Titles

A song’s title is often the last thing a listener thinks about — but some of the most familiar titles in popular music came from origins far stranger, or far more personal, than the finished recordings suggest. Here are five well-documented examples of songs whose titles began somewhere other than the studio.

“Yesterday” Was Once “Scrambled Eggs”

Paul McCartney has told this story many times over the decades: the melody for what became “Yesterday” came to him in a dream, fully formed, and he woke up and played it on a piano beside his bed to make sure he hadn’t simply half-remembered someone else’s song. For weeks afterward, he sang a placeholder line about scrambled eggs to a close friend simply to have words to fit the melody while he worked out the real lyric. The working title stuck around long enough that other members of the Beatles’ circle knew the song by that name before McCartney settled on “Yesterday.”

“Hey Jude” Began as “Hey Jules”

In 1968, Paul McCartney drove out to visit Cynthia Lennon and her young son Julian shortly after John Lennon and Cynthia separated. On the way, McCartney began working out a comforting song addressed directly to the boy, originally singing the opening line with the name “Jules” rather than “Jude.” He later changed the name to “Jude” — partly because he thought it sounded stronger when sung, and partly, by his own account, as a nod to the character Jud Fry from the musical Oklahoma!. John Lennon and Julian Lennon have both spoken publicly about the song’s connection to that period.

“Roxanne” Came From a Paris Hotel and a 19th-Century Play

The Police recorded their debut album in 1978, but the seed for “Roxanne” was planted a year earlier, when the band was staying in a modest hotel near a Paris red-light district. Sting has described noticing sex workers on the street outside and, separately, an old poster in the hotel advertising a production of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac — whose title character is hopelessly in love with a woman named Roxane. Sting has said the two images collided in his head, and he went to his room and wrote the song that night.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” Grew Out of a Joke and a Poem

According to accounts from the band, guitarist Slash originally played the song’s now-famous opening riff as a warm-up exercise, and has said he considered it more of a joke than a real idea at the time. Bandmate Izzy Stradlin built chords around it, and Axl Rose, listening from another room, began fitting in lyrics he had already drafted as a poem for his then-girlfriend, Erin Everly. Rose has specifically credited one lyric — the reference to a “blue sky” — to an actual childhood memory, rather than to anything invented for the song.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came From Graffiti on a Wall

Before it was a Nirvana song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was graffiti. Musician Kathleen Hanna, of the band Bikini Kill, wrote the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on Kurt Cobain’s bedroom wall as an inside joke — Teen Spirit was the name of a deodorant worn by Cobain’s then-girlfriend at the time, Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail. Cobain, by his own account, didn’t know it was a deodorant brand and took the phrase as a compliment about maintaining a rebellious spirit. He later called Hanna to ask permission to use the line in a song.

What These Stories Have in Common

None of these titles were the result of careful brand-style naming sessions. They came from placeholder lyrics, personal nicknames, chance encounters with theater posters, half-remembered poems, and drunken graffiti. That gap between a song’s polished final form and its accidental, often mundane beginnings is part of why these stories tend to stick with listeners long after the songs themselves.

Related Reading

For more on how songs pick up meaning after release, see How Songs Become Cultural Time Capsules. If you’d rather hear some of the artists mentioned here in a different context, Feel-Good Songs for a Brighter Playlist includes several familiar names.