Why is Everyone Singing About Whiskey?
Pour me a double shot of whiskey
While I continue working on my forthcoming book, another writer is taking over my newsletter. This week it’s Eli Miller, a data-savvy social policy researcher. Miller’s done a ton of cool stuff, including writing an article for Vulture trying to predict Taylor Swift setlists. This week, he picks apart a weird trend he’s noticed around people singing about whiskey.
Why is Everyone Singing About Whiskey?
By Eli Miller
As my friends and I were stuck in traffic last year, I noticed an interesting trend on top 40 radio. There were lots of songs about whiskey:
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey: “Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey”
“Too Sweet” by Hozier: “I think I'll take my whiskey neat”
“TEXAS HOLD 'EM” by Beyoncé: “Rugged whiskey cause we surviving / Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passing time, yeah”
“I Remember Everything” by Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves: “Rotgut whiskey’s gonna ease my mind”
That seemed like a lot of whiskey, but as a professional data researcher, I know better than to extrapolate something from a ten-minute stretch of pop radio. Surely this was a goofy coincidence or, even more likely, a bored DJ coming up with a loose theme for their own amusement. Nope. I crunched the numbers. There was an unprecedented amount of whiskey in 2024 pop music.
In the chart above, I looked for lyrical references to whiskey in every song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2000. After a slow build throughout the aughts, whiskey songs finally crossed the 52 song-week threshold in 2007, meaning an average of one whiskey song per week. Then around 2010 there was another surge driven by Kesha’s “brush my teeth with a bottle of jack” line in her smash hit “Tik Tok.” The whiskey explosion would only continue in the 2020s.
There are two overlapping forces at play here. Firstly, this chart coincides neatly with the rise of country crossing over into mainstream pop. Second, as Billboard started to count streaming services toward their charts, it allowed the entire track list of an album to chart, an impossibility a decade before. For example, Morgan Wallen’s 2023 album One Thing At a Time sent all 36 of its songs into the Billboard Hot 100 the week of its release. Wallen, and many other artists who have been popular, enjoy singing about whiskey. So, the country crossover has been amplified by a change in how the charts work.
But wait, is this truly a whiskey phenomenon, or have pop songs just gotten more alcoholic over time? To find out, I also looked at songs that mentioned beer, wine, and drinks generally.
Wine and general alcohol dominate as the most popular alcohol reference for most of this chart, until 2023, when whiskey takes over. Like whiskey, wine is also not immune to the same viral album spikes. Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department, for example, sent 30 songs into the Hot 100. Six of them mentioned wine: “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Florida,” “The Alchemy,” “So High School,” “The Black Dog,” and “I Look Through People’s Windows.” None mentioned whiskey.
Frankly, this is how many trends in popular music start. One guy (i.e., Morgan Wallen) gets popular singing a bunch of songs about whiskey and a year later everyone and the mother are singing about it too.
A New One
"S P E Y S I D E" by Bon Iver
2024 - Folk
This was my favorite song of 2024, so I was looking for an excuse to shoehorn it in here. My initial conceit was that while it doesn’t explicitly mention whiskey, it has the essence of a great whiskey song. With its distraught male vocals, sparse acoustic guitar production, and vague impressionistic lyrics about self-loathing and redemption, I hear this song as a fully realized version of the rootsy, country-ish sound that whiskey stalwarts like Zach Bryan and Josh Meloy are reaching for. Plus, Speyside is a region in Scotland famous for its single malt whiskeys.
An Old One
"Gorgeous" by Taylor Swift
2017 - Synth Pop
It’s hard to believe now, but in October 2017 the conventional wisdom was that Taylor Swift was done. After decisively losing a high wattage PR battle in the court of public opinion to the righteous moral paragons Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Swift tried to rebrand as a villain. Though her evil comeback “Look What You Made Me Do” was a massive commercial success, it was widely seen as a critical flop. Her next attempt, “Ready for It,” retained the same sludgy, abrasive sound as “Look What You Made Me Do” and made fans wonder if she even knew how to make pop bangers anymore.
Then she released “Gorgeous,” and I knew she’d be just fine. The petty tone is still there but she finds the curative that she desperately needed: a sense of humor. This allows the whole thing to loosen up a bit and spotlight her songwriting chops. Among the pantheon of Taylor Swift bangers, this song probably doesn’t crack my top ten, but the way she whines “you ruined my life by not being mine” with just the right amount of detached irony is elite. It perfectly sets up the goofy “ding” that kicks off the chorus. Oh, yeah, and the pre-chorus mentions “whiskey on ice.”
This week’s newsletter came from Eli Miller. If you want to hear more from him, sign up for his newsletter, Ghost Runner.
“Whiskey” is a great musical word. It starts softly like a whisper and climaxes with a hard k sound.
The ultimate is Chris Stapleton, whom I love. Nearly every song on his last three releases is about, or refers to, whiskey.