Here are a handful of quotes about names in songs. (This collection is much smaller than it used to be because I’ve transferred a lot of these quotes into into posts about specific names, e.g., Sharona, Ariel, Jolene, Aja, Joanna, Angelia, Kayleigh).
From the 2010 book Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen’s American Vision by Louis P. Masur:
Peter Knobler, a writer for Crawdaddy, got an early listen [to “Born to Run”] in Springsteen’s Long Branch house. The place was cluttered with motorcycle magazines and old 45s. Over Bruce’s bed, according to Knobler, was a poster of Peter Pan leading Wendy out the window. The detail is suggestive: “Wendy let me in, I wanna be your friend/I want to guard your dreams and visions.”
About the inclusion of the name Emmeline in the Fleetwood Mac song “Seven Wonders” [vid], from the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours (2014) by Zoë Howe:
After hearing [songwriter Sandy] Stewart sing the song first, Stevie misunderstood some of the words, hence the line ‘All the way down to Emmeline’, which has mystified fans for years. The original line was ‘All the way down you held the line’, but the use of a name like ‘Emmeline’ is typical for Stevie, so accustomed are we to hearing her throw in women’s names — ‘Sara’, ‘Lily’ — and thus we look for the clues she scatters in her songs.
(The line sounds more like “on the way down to Emmeline” to me, but it’s hard to tell. It’s also hard to tell if the song, which saw peak popularity in mid-1987, gave a boost to the baby name Emmeline that year — what do you think?)
From a 2013 article about names in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“The Name Game” was a hit for Shirley Ellis in 1965. You know the song: “Shirley-Shirley-bo-burly, banana-fana-fo-furly, fee-fie-foe-murly … Shirley!” She bragged that “there isn’t any name that you can’t rhyme.” While entertaining soldiers in Vietnam, however, she discovered she couldn’t rhyme “Rich” or “Chuck.”
(The other names featured in the original version of the novelty song were Lincoln, Arnold, Tony, Billy, Marsha, and Nick.)
From a Buffalo News review of the memoir The Kennedy Chronicles, written by former MTV video jockey Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, a.k.a. Kennedy:
According to Kennedy, her secret dalliance with the then-married lead singer and frontman of the Goo Goo Dolls led to one of the group’s most well-known songs, the 1995 mega-hit “Name.” To Kennedy, the lyrics hit a little to close to home: “Did you lose yourself somewhere out there? Did you get to be a star?” And then “You could hide beside me/ Maybe for a while. And I won’t tell no one your name.”
She writes: “When I asked him about it he indeed admitted the inspiration and told me there was no way all we’d shared wasn’t going to show up in his writing.”
Here’s the song:
Image: Screenshot of the music video for “Seven Wonders”
[Latest update: Apr. 2026]
