The song, now 25 years old, isn’t back in the atmosphere — it never left.
Photo: Dave Simpson/WireImage

Mozart. Fried chicken. Tae Bo. The best soy latte that you’ve ever had. “Drops of Jupiter” is one of those songs that inspires as much love as it does snark. Twenty-five years after its release, though, it is time to accept that this one has become a modern classic. Its celestial metaphors and soaring strings have earned Diamond certification by the RIAA and been covered by everyone from Taylor Swift to Luke Combs.

But when Pat Monahan, lead singer and songwriter of Train, wrote the song in 2001 because the band’s record label was worried their forthcoming album did not have “the song,” he was not convinced he had hit the mark. Worried it was too long and too strange, he was pleasantly surprised to see the song slowly gain traction and eventually become the band’s signature — and a time capsule of early 2000s culture.

Nate Sloan, co-host of Vulture’s music podcast Switched on Pop, sat down with Monahan to discuss why he thought the song would flop, how Train is like a rom-com, and why he would rather his songs be more famous than him. You can hear their full conversation here.

So 25 years of “Drops of Jupiter,” I wanted to put that in context a little bit. If “Drops of Jupiter” was a young adult, the song could legally rent a car. If you can think back to 2001, when you wrote, recorded, released the song, did you ever imagine it having this kind of longevity?
No, not at all. When you write songs, you try to touch something in yourself that makes you go like, Oh, that feels like something. And I felt something, but it was like a three-and-a-half-minute song with strings, though, and nobody cared. It was not the era for that. It was a weird time.

Do you have a sense of what that spark is that people connect with? Or is it still kind of a mystery?
You know, so I can go back to the history of the song, which was, we were on Columbia Records — I still am — and at the time we had recorded an album that was called Something More, and the president at the time was like, “You don’t have a first single,” something that had to be a hit and get you excited. We didn’t have any of those, and my mother had passed away and so I was not in a good place to write the thing that they were looking for. I worked for three months and one night I fell asleep and woke up with this dream, “Now that she’s back in the atmosphere.” And it was my mother basically saying, “You don’t have to worry about me. Like, go do your thing. I can swim through the planets and come back here with drops of Jupiter in my hair if I want.”

And then I turned that into a love story and it took 15 minutes. Then I went to New York with a demo of it because the record-label president was about to tell me, “You gotta go write songs with professional songwriters,” which was not a part of the rule in my band at the time. We can only write together, which was not a good rule, and it kept us from being better. And before he told me anything, I handed him a disc at the time and said, “This is probably nothing. I had a dream, but here’s something I just wrote.”
And by the time it went, “Plain old Jane told a story about a man,” he just goes, “Fucking song of the year!” And we became a band that could travel all over the world.

Unlike a lot of pop songs, the choruses don’t just repeat the same lyrics, right?
I say “Drops of Jupiter” one time in the entire song. So this was another problem at the time. That’s why in the beginning, for the first 15 years, it was called “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me).” If someone asks for the song, they’re gonna say, “Do you have the song ‘Tell Me?’” — I say “tell me” several times but “drops of Jupiter” one time. But it’s a pretty memorable lyric, and so I think that’s why it was able to hold up.

So that was a bit of a negotiation?
Oh, there were many negotiations. Like, they didn’t want “soy latte” in. The soy latte was, at the time, not very popular. It was said to me that it was a feminine drink. And to me, it’s kind of the only thing. I didn’t even drink coffee at the time, but I would drink a soy latte once in a while.

I feel like time has vindicated you. Those lyrics are some of the most indelible parts of the song today.
Yeah. I’m gonna look up indelible and I think it’s gonna be great when I find out what that means. [Laughs.]

Some of the most memorable parts of the song. There’s also a lyric about Tae Bo.
That’s a really specific thing for me. I am originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. And Tae Bo was invented by a guy named Billy Blanks, also from Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a shout-out to my hometown.

So those lyrics, like you said, they’re very specific and they’re very down to earth. Is it fair to say that’s a characteristic of your music? That combination of something specific and something universal?
Yeah. I’ve always felt that we are a romantic comedy. Like you should be able to laugh and cry while listening to what we do. Or come to a Train concert and have a specific, emotional moment, and then laugh at “50 Ways to Say Goodbye” because it’s so ridiculous. Without those two things, I don’t think music is that fun.

There’s something about hearing those strings in “Drops of Jupter” that gives the song, I don’t know, a depth or a gravitas. When I think about other songs that came out in 2001, that one breaks the mold in a lot of ways.
That’s why for me it was like, This song’s going nowhere. The first time I ever heard it on the radio, I was in Erie I heard it on a college-radio station at like nine o’clock at night. I just remember thinking, “That thing took forever to finish.” Because it was longer than any song these kids were gonna play the whole rest of the week. I thought, “This is gonna be tough.”

There was an SNL skit almost two years ago about “Hey, Soul Sister.” I guess there was a skit also on SNL over ten years ago with “you” and Maroon Five. When you are in the public like that and people are taking your work and doing comedic skits about it, what kind of attitude do you have to take?
You know, if you’re young, you can get your feelings hurt, and if you’re not, it’s like, “Keep it going.” Like, I remember the first time I heard someone speak negatively of us, it was Patton Oswalt. I heard him do a live performance and he talked about what a shitty band Train was and everything. And I was really bummed out because I was a Patton Oswalt fan. And then I realized, I’m just gonna outlast it. And I promise you he wouldn’t say that today.

That seems like a healthy philosophy to have. I wanna go back to this idea of the song evolving. There’s maybe a textbook way to write a song, which is the chorus just repeats as is every time. But something about “Drops of Jupiter,” the chorus evolves and then we get to the outro and we just have these wordless choruses.
“Nah, nah, nah.” You know, it’s funny, I’m a fan of Journey, and Steve Perry ended up calling Brendan O’Brien, who was the producer on it, just to tell him how excited he was that there was another “Na, nah, nah” song — because Steve Perry’s got several of them. So that was pretty fun. That’s the sing-along aspect of the song. It’s hard not to end the night with it. There’s not really something you can follow it up with.

Some artists might have a negative relationship with a song of this success. Maybe even a little resentment. You know, “I have to play this over and over again. I’m trapped.” But I don’t sense that. I sense that you have a real love for this song.
And what a crazy thing to be upset about. No one has ever claimed that I’m emotionally mature, but I gotta tell you, it certainly feels like I am. Because if I knew somebody who didn’t wanna sing that song, because they thought, Why should I, I’m better than that song, like, are you? I mean, I’m not a famous guy, but I have famous songs. And that’s a way better life.

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