Shortly after its release in 2019, Dance Monkey, by the Australian artist Tones and I, became the biggest song in the world. If you passed a radio playing music, you probably heard it. Its lilting, simple piano-and-beat loop had a rapid, whiplash-inducing rise to the top. The statistics around it are so large that they blur into an immeasurable mass: YouTube views and Spotify plays are well into the billions and it is the most Shazammed song of all time. (You’d think, given its ubiquity, people wouldn’t need to Shazam it any more, but it remains in the top spot.) Tones and I had been a busker not long before Dance Monkey came out and, for her, its success was life-changing and then some.
But, as is often the way with songs that become far bigger than their performer, the artist has a complicated relationship with it. “I loathe that song a lot of the time,” she told the Australian station Nova FM. “A lot of the time, I don’t want to sing it. I’m not going to write another song like it.” She was talking about working with songwriters who were aiming to recreate the magic of Dance Monkey. “I was like, I don’t wanna go there any more,” she said.
