Train finished Drops of Jupiter, handed it to Columbia Records and were told it wasn't good enough. The song that saved it, and gave the album its name, arrived in a dream Pat Monahan had about his late mother, and he wrote it in about 15 minutes. Monahan was on his way to New York to be told by label boss Donnie Ienner, the same executive who had once turned the band down, that he would have to start writing with outside songwriters.
He walked into that meeting with a home demo in his pocket instead. Ienner called it the song of the year. Twenty-odd years later "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" has two Grammys and an RIAA Diamond award, and the album it rescued is still the best-selling record Train have made.
Album Facts: Drops of Jupiter by Train
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Train |
| Album | Drops of Jupiter |
| Release Date | 27 March 2001 |
| Label | Columbia |
| Producer(s) | Brendan O'Brien |
| Studio(s) | Southern Tracks, Atlanta; strings at Capitol (Hollywood) and Ocean Way (Nashville) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Pop rock, roots rock |
| Track Count | 11 |
| Total Runtime | 48:33 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | No. 6 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | No. 8 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Australia 3, Netherlands 3, Scotland 3, Norway 9, Canada 14, UK Rock & Metal 1 |
| Certifications | RIAA 3x Platinum (10 March 2021); ARIA 4x Platinum; Music Canada 2x Platinum; BPI Gold |
| Estimated Sales | More than 2 million worldwide in its first year |
| Key Singles | "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)", "Something More", "She's on Fire" |
Cultural Context
Steve Hochman's Los Angeles Times review opened by naming the lane Train were driving in. "The term 'nonthreatening rock' may sound like an oxymoron," he wrote, "but it's been a gold mine ever since Pat Boone sang 'Tutti Frutti.'" In his reckoning Hootie & the Blowfish and Matchbox Twenty were "as much era-defining artists as 2Pac or 'N Sync", and Train were the next earnest American band in line.
The comparison stuck. Train spent late summer 2001 opening for Matchbox Twenty in amphitheatres, and when Robert Christgau got round to the album in the Village Voice that November, he gave it a C minus in a column that also reviewed Matchbox Twenty's Mad Season. Between those two reviews came September 11, which changed what American radio and music video would play. Train found that out the expensive way (see Singles below).
Train's Story Up to This Point
Erie, Pennsylvania produced the singer; San Francisco produced the band. Pat Monahan left Erie in late 1993, met guitarist Rob Hotchkiss in California, and the pair recruited guitarist Jimmy Stafford, bassist Charlie Colin and drummer Scott Underwood. By 1994 the line-up was settled, and the band rehearsed in the Counting Crows' space in Emeryville.
Columbia flew them to New York in 1996 to seal a deal. It didn't happen. Monahan remembers Ienner's verdict as "I don't see anything special about this band." So Train raised $25,000 from family and friends and made their own record, self-produced with help from Matt Wallace and Counting Crows' Dave Bryson, who mixed it. "Meet Virginia" and "Free" landed on an Aware Records compilation and started to get a response, and the self-titled Train came out through Aware and Columbia on 24 February 1998.
It was a slow burn. The debut spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart in the summer of 1999, "Meet Virginia" reached No. 20 on the Hot 100 and the album went platinum. "We sold a million albums with 'Meet Virginia' and worked hard to do it," Monahan told American Songwriter. Ienner had stayed in the background for all of that. On the second record, as Monahan put it, "Donnie got way more involved."
Pre-production and Demos
Soundchecks produced most of Drops of Jupiter. Train were on the road behind "Meet Virginia" and had no other time to write, so they jammed at soundchecks and taped the results. Writing as a whole band was new for them too.
"We were listening to all these tapes of all these soundchecks, so the album was all written out of jams, which was different than the first record."
Charlie Colin, Mix, 2001
They wanted Brendan O'Brien, who had worked with Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots, to make it. According to Songfacts, the label laughed at the idea and other producers had been tried without clicking, but a Limp Bizkit album O'Brien was booked to make fell through and left him free for a few months. His management passed at first, according to Mix, until O'Brien remembered "Meet Virginia" from the radio. He flew to San Francisco to hear what they had, which Monahan reckoned was 10 to 14 ideas in various states of repair. "He came in and said, 'Man, these are great starts. This is what we need. Let's make a record.'"
Columbia were meanwhile pushing "I Am" to Top 40 radio, so the band "recorded, wrote, pre-produced the whole thing in about two months, and then went out and toured 'I Am.'" Then they delivered it. Monahan admitted on the Off The Record podcast in 2026 that Columbia didn't like what they got:
"We had all the songs pretty much written, except for 'Drops Of Jupiter.' And we delivered the record, and it was not what they had wanted. And in hindsight, they were right."
Pat Monahan, Off The Record podcast, 2026 (via Songfacts)
The Dream That Wrote Drops of Jupiter
Monahan's mother died of lung cancer while Train were touring the debut. She was 68 and he was 30, and he had spent that tour ringing her from pay phones. "I never got a chance to buy my mom a house, or a car, or to do anything to say thank you," he told Paste.
The band also had a rule that nobody wrote with outsiders, which Monahan later called "a mistake". Ienner had summoned him to New York to break it. As Monahan tells it, the message was going to be: "You're gonna go write with writers or I'm gonna find you a song to cover."
Two days before the flight, back in Erie, he fell asleep and woke "maybe ten minutes later" with the whole lyric and melody in his head. He went downstairs, wrote it in 15 minutes and demoed it the next day. On VH1's Behind the Music he said it came "about a year after my mother passed away with the words 'back in the atmosphere'". On day three he played Ienner the disc. At the "Plain old Jane" line, Monahan says, Ienner went: "Whoa! Fucking song of the year."
Monahan has said it "feels like she wrote it": his mother swimming through the planets with drops of Jupiter in her hair. "But then I turned it into a love song, because that's people wanted to hear." The scar in the lyric is a real one of his. Not every line was safe, though. Monahan told WFPK he was nearly forced to change the "soy latte" line because it was "not masculine enough". He refused: "I don't even drink soy lattes, but that was the line."
Creating the Album at Southern Tracks
Money was the first difference from the debut. "The money that we spent and the fact that Brendan O'Brien did the recording and producing of it, that's a big difference," Monahan told Mix in 2001. The other difference was how they played. Train tracked most of the record live in Southern Tracks' main room onto 48-track analogue tape, all five playing together with no headphones, hearing each other through a PA. Some solos went down live and others came later, with trumpet and strings overdubbed afterwards.
O'Brien, who mixed and played keyboards on the album as well as producing it, recorded it with engineer Nick DiDia. Neither would talk to Mix, but the band did. "He's able to get the best out of everybody," said Monahan. Colin used O'Brien's effects and amps and stomped through a Big Muff and a wah-wah on "Getaway". Underwood brought a trance groove for "Mississippi" programmed on a Roland Groovebox, then decided real loops would be better. O'Brien and DiDia recorded two bars of Underwood playing a bass drum with a mallet, and then he tapped a snare with his finger. Monahan wasn't sure at first: "I really want to take advantage of technology, but I don't want to date our records."
The title song and "Hopeless" were both late additions. "'Drops of Jupiter' was not written in the beginning," Monahan said. "It kind of took over as the song that was to describe the record." Ienner's influence went further than the song. Because Almost Famous, with all its Elton John songs, was a big film at the time, he insisted Elton's old arranger Paul Buckmaster score the strings. For "Something More", David Campbell wrote the arrangement and the band took a private jet to record it.
"Getting into a plane with a bunch of guys to go have an orchestra play on one of your songs is a pretty great rock 'n' roll moment."
Pat Monahan, Mix, 2001
That was a rented Lear jet from Atlanta to Nashville, where the "Something More" strings went down at Ocean Way. The "Drops of Jupiter" strings were recorded at Capitol in Hollywood.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, trumpet, saxophone, vibraphone, percussion | Pat Monahan | Muted trumpet on "Mississippi" |
| Guitar, backing vocals, mandolin | Jimmy Stafford | |
| Guitar, bass, backing vocals, harmonica | Rob Hotchkiss | |
| Bass, guitar, backing vocals | Charlie Colin | Big Muff and wah on "Getaway" |
| Drums, keyboards, programming, percussion | Scott Underwood | Built the "Mississippi" loop |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Piano | Chuck Leavell | "Drops of Jupiter" |
| Keyboards | Brendan O'Brien | Producer doubling as player |
| Conductor, string arrangement | Paul Buckmaster | "Drops of Jupiter" |
| Strings | Michael Markman, Evan Wilson, Suzie Katayama, Dan Smith | Violin, viola, cello, cello on "Drops of Jupiter" |
| String arrangement | David Campbell | "Something More" |
| Strings | Carl Gorodetzky, Kris Wilkinson, Bob Mason | Violin and concertmaster, viola, cello on "Something More" |
| Backing vocals | Fleming McWilliams | "Mississippi" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, mixing | Brendan O'Brien | |
| Recording | Nick DiDia | |
| Orchestral engineer | Steve Churchyard | Assisted by Steve Genewick |
| Second engineers | Ryan Williams, David Bryant | Bryant on "Something More" |
| Assistant engineer | Karl Egsieker | |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig | |
| Artwork | ||
| Art direction | Joel Zimmerman | |
| Illustrations | Tony Hernandez | |
| Photography | Ralf Strathmann | |
The biggest name on the credits is Chuck Leavell, the Allman Brothers and Rolling Stones keyboard player, and Monahan gives him credit for the title track's groove. Every song is credited to all five members of Train. That five-way split meant all five shared the Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Best Rock Song.
The Songs on Drops of Jupiter
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | She's on Fire | Train | 3:49 | Yes | Third single, 2002 |
| 2 | I Wish You Would | Train | 4:25 | No | |
| 3 | Drops of Jupiter | Train | 4:21 | Yes | Written last; Leavell piano, Buckmaster strings |
| 4 | It's About You | Train | 4:27 | No | |
| 5 | Hopeless | Train | 4:31 | No | Late addition alongside the title track |
| 6 | Respect | Train | 3:25 | No | Monahan on vibraphone |
| 7 | Let It Roll | Train | 5:00 | No | Monahan's tribute to his mother |
| 8 | Something More | Train | 4:33 | Yes | Strings cut at Ocean Way, Nashville |
| 9 | Whipping Boy | Train | 4:26 | No | |
| 10 | Getaway | Train | 4:26 | No | Colin's Big Muff and wah bass |
| 11 | Mississippi | Train | 5:00 | No | Mallet-and-fingertip loop, muted trumpet |
Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)
Monahan's biggest worry was the running time. He first heard it on a college station in Pennsylvania at about 11 at night and it "kind of scared me because it was so long of a song." What lifts it is the push and pull between the strings and the piano.
"The best part about the recording of it was that we had Chuck Leavell play the piano and he's the one that made it bounce like that."
Pat Monahan, American Songwriter, 2021
Not every review liked it. The Rensselaer student paper The Polytechnic found the string and piano section "too reminiscent of an Elton John song", which, given Ienner's reasons for hiring Buckmaster, was roughly the point. The LA Times thought Monahan sounded like "a dead ringer for the Black Crowes' Chris Robinson" on it. One lyric caused trouble of its own: Van Halen fans sent hate mail, convinced he was singing "Van Halen is overrated" instead of "heaven is overrated". "Dude, I love Van Halen," was his reply.
Let It Roll
Monahan's other song for his mother is the more direct one. "I found out she was terminally ill through a card someone handed me backstage at a show," he told WFPK. "I spent an hour crying at a payphone. That song came from that moment." Rolling Stone's Aidin Vaziri heard its "mournful slide guitars and loose-limbed rhythms" as "the perfect meeting of blustery earnestness and unapologetic commerciality".
Mississippi
The closer is the album's oddest track and Scott Underwood's favourite: "I love trance and I love that quality of drumming where there's a continual loop." On top of that homemade loop, Monahan played muted trumpet. "I've played some bad trumpet onstage!" he admitted, but he wanted to do it himself rather than hire a player. Fleming McWilliams sings backing vocals. Vaziri called it "brooding" and liked its "dreamy horns".
Respect and Getaway
Monahan plays vibraphone on "Respect", which the LA Times filed under the album's "late-night moods". On "Getaway", Colin uses fuzz and wah pedals on the bass, and said that across the album he was playing "much more higher-frequency melodic stuff, like upper-octave parts."
B-sides, Outtakes and the 20th Anniversary Edition
The outtakes have been released in stages. An independent edition added "Sweet Rain" and "It's Love", and Japan got "This Is Not Your Life". The title single used them as B-sides: the UK CD carried "It's Love" and "This Is Not Your Life", the Australian CD added "Sharks", and the US 7-inch backed it with "Meet Virginia".
For the 20th anniversary, on 26 March 2021, the stragglers were gathered into one reissue, released digitally and as a limited-edition bronze vinyl pressing. The six bonus tracks are:
- "It's Love"
- "This Is Not Your Life"
- "Ramble On" (acoustic)
- "Sharks"
- "Sweet Rain"
- "Drops of Jupiter" live at The Warfield, San Francisco, May 2001
Monahan's press statement called the making of it "a whirlwind of tragedy and beauty", adding: "I'm sure that she wrote it with me in a living room in Erie, PA."
Album Artwork and Packaging
The sleeve shows a painted child, seen side-on from slightly behind, in a gold paper crown and an oversized dark coat over bare legs and black strap shoes. The child is holding a white dove. Behind is plain pale wood grain, with "train" scrawled in rough red letters top left and the title set in a small brown serif at the bottom right. Joel Zimmerman is credited with art direction, Tony Hernandez with illustrations and Ralf Strathmann with photography. The CD also carried a film about making the "Drops of Jupiter" video.
Release and Reception
The title song's video premiered on VH1 on 20 March 2001, the album followed a week later, and Train played Letterman's show the next night. Drops of Jupiter entered the Billboard 200 at No. 6 and kept selling all summer. By late July MTV reported it was still in the top 20. In the UK it entered at No. 13 on 18 August 2001 and climbed to No. 8 a week later.
Critics were less keen. Metacritic averages 60. Entertainment Weekly gave it a C+, AllMusic's Mark Morgenstein said there was "nothing cutting edge" about it, and Billboard felt it "fails to gain any momentum until track seven". Christgau's C minus came in a short capsule: "Went platinum. That should triangulate them for you."
"It's pleasant and accomplished but lacking in both artistic and emotional statements, perfect for satisfying fans without disturbing them."
Steve Hochman, Los Angeles Times, 2001
None of that mattered by Grammy night. At the 44th Grammy Awards at the Staples Center on 27 February 2002, "Drops of Jupiter" was up for five awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It lost those two to U2's "Walk On" and Alicia Keys' "Fallin'", but won Best Rock Song and, for Buckmaster, Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s). Train played it with a cello prelude by Denise Djokic and a full orchestra, and Monahan thanked his mother.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | US | UK | Australia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me) | 29 January 2001 (US radio) | Hot 100: 5 | 10 | 5 |
| Something More | 2001 | Bubbling Under: 15; Adult Alternative: 7 | 87 | |
| She's on Fire | 18 February 2002 | Adult: 21 | 49 | 57 |
"Drops of Jupiter" went to US adult radio on 29 January 2001, two months before the album, entered the Hot 100 on 10 March and stayed there for 54 weeks. It peaked at No. 5, spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Pop Airplay chart and finished 2001 as the year's No. 4 single. The UK single entered at No. 10 on 11 August 2001. The song was so durable that Train put out a second video, a concert clip from the Warfield, to give TV programmers an alternative to the first.
"Something More" is where the year turned. In July 2001 MTV reported that Nick Brandt would shoot its video in Toronto on 5 and 6 August, with Monahan climbing a giant ladder up the side of a skyscraper and peering into windows as he went. Then came September 11. "We had a $400,000 video where I was climbing a skyscraper," Monahan told WFPK. "It got scrapped immediately." "James Taylor's Fire and Rain stopped getting played. Everything just froze." Marc Smerling reshot it in the Arizona desert, and Smerling also directed the video for "She's on Fire", which reached No. 49 in the UK in March 2002.
Touring and Live
The Drops of Jupiter tour ran through 2001 and 2002. On 26 May 2001 Train played a homecoming show at The Warfield in San Francisco, which was filmed for the Midnight Moon DVD. The summer's big job was opening for Matchbox Twenty on a 30-city amphitheatre tour that began in Fargo on 31 July and took in Atlanta on 31 August and Houston on 8 September.
Touring brought its own trouble. Monahan and Stafford were detained by about 20 Italian police after using a laptop and a Walkman as their plane landed, until officers realised they were rock stars in town for a TV show. In the same interview, Stafford joked: "I guess there will probably never be a 'Behind the Music' on us." VH1 made a Behind the Music episode on Train in 2012.
Covers and Afterlife
- Taylor Swift covered the song live, and folk singer Judy Collins has performed it.
- Phil Poole sang it on The Voice UK in 2012, sending it back into the UK chart, where it reached No. 34.
- In 2011 Train launched a Drops of Jupiter California red wine.
- The RIAA certified the single Diamond on 13 November 2025.
Legacy of Drops of Jupiter
Success didn't hold the line-up together. Rob Hotchkiss left in 2003, around the follow-up My Private Nation, unhappy that Monahan had started writing with the producer and leaving the band out. "I started to feel like a backup player in the Pat Monahan Show," he told Bullz-Eye in 2004. Charlie Colin was pushed out that October and replaced by the Black Crowes' Johnny Colt. Train went on to more hits, including "Calling All Angels" and "Hey, Soul Sister", which went Diamond four years before "Drops of Jupiter" did.
Drops of Jupiter is still Train's biggest album, though. The RIAA certified it 3x Platinum on 10 March 2021, just before the anniversary edition. Monahan was stung when a San Francisco publication dismissed Train as Abercrombie & Fitch music, but the song outlasted the jibes. When Rolling Stone ranked the 250 greatest songs of the 21st century in 2025, Rob Sheffield called it the closest the era has come to a "Don't Stop Believin'" or "Africa" of its own.
"Every era gets the lighters-up, power-ballad, arena-rock anthem it deserves, and for the early 2000s, Train delivered with 'Drops of Jupiter.'"
Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 2025
Monahan still can't quite do it again. "I've been trying to write that song again ever since," he said in 2021.
Things You Might Not Know About Drops of Jupiter
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The rejected album | Train were set to release the album without either the title song or "Hopeless", until Columbia made clear it wasn't what they wanted. |
| Written from soundcheck tapes | Most of the songs grew out of taped soundcheck jams on the "Meet Virginia" tour, the only time the band had to write. |
| Why Buckmaster? | Almost Famous and its Elton John songs were big, so Ienner insisted on Elton's arranger Paul Buckmaster for the strings. |
| No headphones | The five members tracked most of the album together on 48-track analogue, listening through a PA instead of headphones. |
| The Limp Bizkit gap | O'Brien was free only because a Limp Bizkit album he was due to produce was cancelled, according to Songfacts. |
| The singer's trumpet | Monahan played the muted trumpet on "Mississippi" himself rather than hire somebody, having only taken up the instrument a few years earlier. |
Listen to the Riffology Podcast
Want the full story told out loud? The Riffology podcast has an episode on Train's Drops of Jupiter, covering the dream, the rejected first version and the strings that won a Grammy. Search for Riffology on all major podcast platforms.
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