Sometimes an artist may come to hate a song because everyone expects him to perform it at every opportunity. Other times he hates it from the beginning.
An example of the first was Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor. Rachmaninoff could not escape playing it in every concert or private gathering, and he wished he hadn’t composed it.
Jim Morrison detested singing “Light My Fire.” Everyone wanted to hear this at every concert and he was completely bored with it. Yeah, he had other issues, but he despised singing this song after a couple of years.
Don McLean has in his performance contract that when you do commercials for his show at your venue, you can’t just play “American Pie.” You have to back it with other songs of his and have “American Pie” last.
He does play it at his shows, though. He knows where the money is
The enormously influential, grammy winning jazz singer Bobby McFerrin apparently grew to detest “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” - a modest little throwaway ditty that became an enormous hit pop song. In one interview, he described the success of the song like someone taking an enormous eraser and simply deleting the decades long prestigious jazz career he’d had, and forever after he was known as just another one-hit wonder with a cheap novelty song.
I can’t remember the artist’s name offhand, but there was a female country star who put out a fairly big country hit called “Maybe I Mean Yes.” The gist of the song is a feller asks her out, she plays hard to get, and when he doesn’t chase after her, she gets all pouty.
Then somebody pointed out to the singer that the lyrics could be misinterpreted to be endorsing date rape. (“When I say no, sometimes I mean yes…”) She disowned the song after that.
The author Dave Barry was discussing a book tour he was on (this was in one of his books, but I can’t recall which at the moment), where he mentioned that, given the number of interviews and press appearances that he had to do, he grew to actively hate the books he wrote.
Adam Duritz of Counting Crows has had moments where he’s grown tired of “Mr. Jones,” and so, when they perform it live, they’ve been known to slow the tempo, so that the audience has trouble matching the rhythm to sing along. Dick move, but it can be entertaining to watch.
Loquillo cites “A por ellos que son pocos y cobardes” as “proof that a record can sell well when the group is falling apart and the songs are a mixture of old ones fished from dark corners and others slapped together because ‘we need one more’”.
A guy in my home town wrote a song for his local club. He doesn’t quite regret having written it, but he got to the point of threatening the local representative of the “Songwriters Union” (SGAE) with a court order: the SGAE guy kept badgering him to join up so he could get paid any time the song gets played, the writer says “I’m a plumber, not a songwriter, and the song is fucking free damnit! If I want to let people play it for free I can do it and SGAE can [insert anatomical impossibility here]”
Nava. I realize English isn’t your first language. I usually have a hard time following you all the way to the end and it’s getting worse for me over the years. Sometimes you make no sense. It may be me. It may be the language barrier. I’m not sure any more but this is getting weird.
Where on earth did you hear this? Sinatra was on record as hating the sing-song nature of the tune, which he lampooned with his famous “doo-be-doo-be-doo at the end”. I’ve never heard a peep about him thinking it was about two gay men.
You are right though that he hated the song even after the awards and despite the fact that it was his first million-seller. I recall watching a recording of him performing this song during his Concert For The Americas performance (which he stated beforehand that he didn’t usually sing but would that time as a favor for a very special person). As he walked back toward the orchestra after the song was finished, amid hearty applause and with the microphone at his side and apparently out of range, he laughingly yelled to the orchestra, “I hate that fucking song!”
Let me see if I can restructure it with less subordinates…
There is a famous singer known by the nick “Loquillo”. He used to be in a group. The last record he did with the group sold very well. He says the group was falling apart at the time and the record was made very carelessly. Not his favorite record.
There is an association called SGAE, which handles copyright for songwriters in Spain. There was a guy who wrote a song and wants it to be free-to-use. The SGAE was on his case about joining them and charging for the song for years. He eventually threatened them with court proceedings if they didn’t get lost.
I believe that Rod Stewart seriously regretted singing Do Ya Think I’m Sexy because he wanted to be a crooner, yet that song instead sent him into a pop career he didn’t feel comfortable in. His later career, starting in the 90s, matches closer to what he wanted to be all along.
I think a similar thing happened with The Beastie Boys and Fight For Your Right To Party, where they felt they had to maintain this troublemaking image that wasn’t their personality at all.
This always gets mentioned, but Billy Joel absolutely hates Just the Way You Are. He didn’t want to put it on his album, The Stranger, in the first place, but Phil Ramone, the producer, didn’t feel there were enough songs to fill the album if it was left out. And since he wrote it for his first wife, Elizabeth, the song only brought up bad memories in the wake of their divorce.
