Columbia Records
Train‘s latest hit, “Play that Song,” is about guy who asks both a deejay and a guitarist to play a song that his girl loves. Train singer Pat Monahan says he gets his share of requests, too…but some of them have nothing to do with music.
“There’s a lot of requests, but they’re mostly from more intense fans that wanna hear songs that we haven’t played in a while,” he tells ABC Radio. “But I get emails or, I should say, direct messages on Twitter a lot, like, ‘Will you call my girlfriend so she’ll be nicer to me?'”
When “Play that Song” was first released, it was instantly familiar to some people, because it’s based on the melody of the 1938 standard “Heart and Soul.” Monahan says at first, he was concerned that there would be copyright issues.
“I called my manager ’cause I was like, ‘Hey man, I’m about to write a song but the melody is “Heart and Soul,”‘” he tells ABC Radio. “What a good manager should do in that case is say, ‘Just do it’…’cause they know there’s a 99 1/2 percent chance it’s garbage anyway.”
So Monahan’s manager did just that — and then discovered that the resulting song was not, in fact, garbage.
“When they heard it, they were like, ‘OK, cool, we’ll get back to you,'” he says. “‘Cause what they were really doing was going, ‘Oh my God, this is a hit! We gotta go see if we can get permission.'”
Which they did. Pat notes, “It all worked out great.” (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)
“Play that Song” is the first official single from Train’s current album A girl, a bottle, a boat. Train’s tour in support of the album gets underway May 12 in Las Vegas, with opening acts Natasha Bedingfield and O.A.R.
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