Firework
Since its release in 2010, Katy Perry’s “Firework” has been a motivational anthem. But, according to the pop queen, it was her own impending mortality that inspired it. “Basically, I have this very morbid idea,” Perry told Billboard in 2010. “When I pass, I want to be put into a firework and shot across the sky over the Santa Barbara Ocean as my last hurrah.” Perry added that she liked the fact that fireworks make crowds “ooh” and “ahh.” “I guess that making people go ‘ahhh’ is kind of like my motto,” she said.
Love Song
Sara Bareilles does not tell a clingy boyfriend to get off her back in her 2007 single “Love Song,” contrary to common misconception. In reality, like Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe,” Bareilles wrote this song for record label executives who demanded that she write a romantic song that she didn’t have in her repertoire. “They had encouraged me to keep writing, and I just wasn’t having any luck, and I was turning in the beginnings of ideas and snippets of moments of a song, and I was just getting a really sort of blasé reaction to everything,” she told MTV in 2008. “It’s totally honest, and I’m very lucky the label liked it as well.”