A Better Birthday Song

Happy Birthday To You is a terrible song. It's a terrible song in general and a terrible birthday song especially. It sounds like a dirge. It sounds like bagpipes, and I say this with love for the bagpipes. It's not a happy song, despite literally being a song about being happy. IT DOES NOT SCAN. Maybe it technically scans if you sing it quickly, but it does not scan at the tempo it's usually sung at. It definitely doesn't scan if your name has more or fewer than two syllables. The octave-jump in the third line throws people so badly they end up screeching. Can we focus on that octave-jump for a second? This song's sole purpose is to be short and happy and sing-alongable, and the only thing it achieves is being short.

Now, I know what you're thinking: path dependency is a powerful drug, we're stuck in this birthday-song equilibrium and there's nothing anyone can do about it. But if the last few years have taught us anything it's that terrible long-time equilibria collapse like fortunes: slowly and then all at once. We can do better, and we must do better, and we will do better.

So. If you were designing a birthday melody from scratch today, what would you look for? I think the key properties would be:

• upbeat
• recognizable
• short
• sing-alongable
• scans nicely

It would also be nice if it was out of copyright, though note that we allowed Warner Music Group to extort $2m a year for the incumbent birthday song until the 2010s AND IT WASN'T EVEN A GOOD SONG.

I will be honest that there is an obvious and correct candidate for the new melody, and I will also be honest that I'm going to cakebait you slightly by withholding it for a minute.

Basically, we're looking for an existing melody that everyone already knows AND everyone can sing easily, which got me thinking: what are the most widely recognizable melodies that everyone can actually sing, even if they're copyrighted?

I looked up lists of The Most Famous Songs ever, which was fun. My favorite option there before I gave up was:

Look, I just met you
and this is crazy
But it's your birthday
So happy birthdee.

But I quickly realized that this whole "take a famous modern song and change the lyrics" approach doesn't work for two big reasons. The first is that a lot of songs sung by professional song-singers are actually very hard to sing, which I guess makes sense; it's like how I don't choose my clothes based on what looks good on professional models.

The second is that popular music recognizability is far too stratified by age and demographics for any song to be widely recognizable; even my Call Me Maybe reference above is entirely self-indulgent and probably baffling to at least half of you reading this. I looked up the most popular songs of 2024 and despite not having that many birthdays under my belt I literally didn't recognize a single one of them.

So, what are the melodies that "everyone" has heard before? If you search online the list is topped, ironically, by Happy Birthday. Barring that, what else do we have? Pachelbel's Canon is delightful but unsingable. La Marseillaise would be fun but maybe a little too grand for most of us; Ode To Joy, similarly.

I briefly alighted on, and desperately wanted to endorse, the Nokia Ringtone: once the world's most-recognized melody, supposedly, and it would be so lovely for a bar trivia night in 2100 to ask "what is the strange origin of the melody for the universally-known Birthday Song?" But presumably anyone born after 1993 already doesn't even know what a ringtone is, let alone the Nokia one.

More realistically, the correct melody was always going to be one of those old-timey folksy melodies that you've known since childhood and don't know the origin of. Unlike pop-songs, these were written for people who aren't good at singing to sing along with. Yankee Doodle and When The Saints Go Marching In are both strong contenders, and both have the positive vibes I'm looking for on my birthday. (Yankee Doodle even provides us with a charming new pasta-based birthday-hat tradition, which would frankly bring the house down at a kids' party). But I think realistically there was only ever going to be one winner:

Twinkle Twinkle.

Twinkle Twinkle is not my favorite melody. If I were king of the universe and could force the choice of the new Birthday Tune, I would do much better. But if there's another thing the last few years have taught us, it's that you don't get to vote for the person you truly you want, you get forced to vote for the person with the best chance of beating something else you truly despise. And Twinkle Twinkle simply is the universally-acceptable candidate that can save us from the terrors of the current birthday song. It's short, it's familiar, it's slow enough to sing while bringing the cake out, and adaptable enough that you can spend your whole childhood singing Twinkle Twinkle and ABCD without noticing they're the same @#$ing tune. It was good enough for Mozart, and it's good enough for you. Happy Birthday, friends.