The Tragic Story of ‘Drops of Jupiter’ by Train

By Oliver Tearle

Few songs can claim to have caused prominent film stars to be arrested, but Train’s ‘Drops of Jupiter’ belongs to this elite and illustrious club. But before I address the bizarre story of how a song managed to land Charlie Sheen in trouble with the law, it’s probably worth pondering the strangeness of that title.

This 2001 song, it turns out, is about the lead singer Pat Monahan’s mother. After her death, Monahan has said (in an interview with VH1) the words ‘back in the atmosphere’ came to him, much as ‘Scrambled Eggs’ (latterly ‘Yesterday’) came to Paul McCartney, shortly after waking one morning. Which only proves the importance of lying in of a morning rather than getting up and going to work.

Monahan went on to say that the loss of the most important person in his life inspired him to think: what if no one ever really leaves? What if his mother were ‘here but different’ or ‘back in the atmosphere’?

Losing someone dear to us can lead us to entertain such forlorn hopes, and the song is upbeat despite its origins in grief and loss. The orrery of images the song presents to us makes it almost metaphysical in its trappings (if not in its philosophical range): one can imagine an inferior follower of John Donne coming up with the idea of coursing through the solar system after death and returning with drops of Jupiter in their hair.

Indeed, ever since I heard this song I’ve always wondered why some shampoo company didn’t market a product with the name Drops of Jupiter, ‘with added gobbets of methane, crystals of ammonia and ceramide G’.

Drops of Uranus, meanwhile, would be a very different product, presumably for a completely different part of the body.

The song’s focus on all things astronomical provides it with its distinctive perspective on the afterlife: rather than heaven, the singer’s late mother is merely a journeywoman through the heavens, and – like a ghost in old medieval folktales – can return to earth to deliver her loved ones a positive message. Indeed, ‘heaven’ itself may even be overrated.

In this case, the message is that there’s still time to change one’s ways, and the singer takes this advice to heart. But it’s also a personal journey for the mother, too: the singer wonders if she found herself out there, suggesting that this voyage through the cosmos is almost like a belated gap year, though presumably with greater epiphanic potential for enlightenment than most gap years hold.

I mean, whatever young Tarquin learns about himself on his jolly around Thailand before taking up a place at Peterhouse to study PPE, he’s unlikely to return having seen shooting stars around the rings of Uranus – although in fairness, that perhaps depends on which Bangkok establishments he’s visited.

Of course, what it means to return to the atmosphere from outer space, when you’re technically dead, is something to keep listeners busy, if they’ve a mind to speculate. Is this merely a flying visit (in the literal sense), as she reappears to her son and delivers a positive message about the afterlife?

Given her penchant for listening to Mozart and doing something called ‘Tae-Bo’ (no, me neither … but apparently it’s a fitness regime that incorporates martial arts techniques), the implication is that she’s ‘back back’, as Micky Flanagan might say, rather than merely ‘back’.

In other words, she hasn’t been literally brought back to life, but now the singer has overcome his grief at her passing, he can rediscover the happy memories of her life and keep those alive in his mind, so it’s as if she has come ‘back’ from the dead through being remembered happily by her loved ones. This would explain the upbeat nature of the music.

The song is of more interest for its lyrics than for its music, which seems fairly conventional next to the singer’s quasi-metaphysical talk about his late mother’s odyssey amongst the stars. Indeed, personally I’d not paid much attention to the lyrics and had written the song off as so much romantic froth until someone pointed out I’d been missing the whole point of the song by dismissing it as fluff.

That said, I’m not still not sure precisely what to make of it: I’ve never been able to get past the disjointed and telegrammatic way Monahan sings the first verse, as if he’s travelling on a particularly bumpy train (appropriately enough) or suffering from a bad case of hiccups.

One person who did know what to make of it was, apparently, Charlie Sheen, who was arrested in 2009 after an altercation with his wife, who allegedly didn’t take kindly to learning that Sheen and his daughter shared a love for ‘Drops Of Jupiter’: they had their own song, while she and Sheen didn’t, I think, was the suggestion.

But whether we love or hate the song, it’s worth bearing in mind that the best song written about the solar system is, obviously, OMD’s 1996 masterpiece ‘Walking on the Milky Way’, even though that sees fit to pair ‘seen us’ with ‘Venus’. Train doesn’t dare to commit such a crime against rhyme, at least.