Fitz and the Tantrums have a new album out – All the Feels. I was taking MadBee to school this morning on the first single from the album came on SiriusXM on the way. The song is 123456. I haven’t listened to any of the rest of the album yet, but I probably will. I like a lot of their songs and they’re fun to sing along with. But this tune seems to fit into a particular thing about some of their songs. I haven’t listened to any interviews or done any research on this, so don’t @ me, but here’s kind of how I think they come to write some of their songs. Take The Walker from their second album. I figure they’re sitting around and someone says something like, “hey why don’t we write a song that includes a lot of whistling?” Someone comes up with the tune, they whistle it and, voila, they’ve got a hit. Next album, they say, “hey, that whistle song went over so well, we should do one with clapping.” And then someone else in the band says, “let’s be even more obvious about it and just call it Handclap.” And, they’ve got a hit again.
So at this point, they’ve got a winning formula. So I figure one of the band members has a young child, just learning her ABC’s and counting. So, they come into the recording studio and say, “I’ve got our next hit – 123456.” And here we are. They seem to be doing one of this songs per album, but I’ll come back and report if they’ve got any others on the new album.
As I said, I kinda dig Fitz and the Tantrums and I don’t really care if they write their songs this way or not. For the record, though, my favorite two are Don’t Gotta Work it Out, which my old band and I performed (from the first album) and Fool. Here’s that one: