The recent wedding movie, “You’re Cordially Invited,” put the Bee Gees back in the spotlight with its use of the 1983 hit song, “Islands in the Stream.” A lot of younger readers of this wedding blog may not be aware of the enormous popularity of this band, and the power of Bee Gees love songs.
At one point in the late 1970s, the Bee Gees either wrote or performed on 9 of the top one-hundred songs on the Billboard charts. With 120 million international record sales, only Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, and Paul McCartney have surpassed that mark. Pretty amazing.
Nine of their songs made the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts, surpassed by only the Beatles and the Supremes. A bunch of those came about from the monster success of “Saturday Night Fever” and their foray into disco music. In this fevered era, they produced one of the all-time great disco songs, “Stayin’ Alive.” Take a listen:
Stayin’ Alive
Although it’s not a love song, it is certainly a dance song! On one Bee Gees playlist on Spotify, this song has over 1.1 Billion streams, and counting!
And yet the Bee Gees had a gift for writing compelling love songs, such as “How Deep Is Your Love?” from Saturday Night Fever:
“How Deep Is Your Love?”
The lyrics work beautifully for your first dance song:
“I believe in you,
You know the door to my very soul.”
The Bee Gees were born in England, but their parents immigrated to Australia when the Gibbs brothers, Barry, Robin, and Maurice were young. They formed the Bee Gees in the 1960s and enjoyed a string of hits including, “I Started a Joke” (1969), “Lonely Days” (1971), and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (1971), songs that were slow ballads. The disco craze breathed new life into the band’s trajectory, with “Night Fever” one of their biggest hits, spending 8 weeks at #1 in 1978:
“Night Fever”
What a dance song! Barry Gibb’s falsetto vocals became a signature feature of Bee Gees hit songs. The passionate lyrics make for a great first dance song:
“And that sweet city woman
She moves through the light
Controlling my mind and my soul.”
“Too Much Heaven”
To prove they weren’t just a disco band, in 1979 the Bee Gees wrote and recorded another #1 hit song with the ballad, “Too Much Heaven,” a year after their Saturday Night Fever success. The song exclaims,
“Love is such a beautiful thing!”
Nice stuff for your first dance song.
The Bee Gees poured it on the 1970s, but managed only one top 20 song in the 1980s. Nonetheless, their legacy was established as one of the all-time greatest singing groups.
Interestingly, it is these older songs that get the most streams on Spotify, Amazon, and other streaming platforms. Writing in The Atlantic, music historian, Ted Gioia, said “old music is killing new music.” The piece explains that
“Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: the new-music market is actually shrinking.”
Amazingly, the newest tunes represent less than five percent of total streams. One reason: legends like the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and the Beatles wrote mountains of great songs that music lovers revisit time and time again.
Why do you think we love providing music and entertainment at weddings so much for Cookeville couples! We’re playing the best songs ever written. We’re packing dance floors and creating wedding memories that never fade. If you’re planning a wedding, check us out. We’ll play the tunes you want: Bee Gees, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar. Get ready for fun in the hands of total pros.
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