I found a listening calendar that is the 13 days of Halloween, or the spooky season. I’ve shared it with my students, so I thought I’d expound on it a bit more in a blog post format.
Yes, we’re starting with Spooky Scary Skeletons. Where in the world did this song come from? The song was written by Andrew Gold and has been around since 1996. Thanks to the Internet, it has taken on a life of its own in meme culture. In 2019, Intelligencer‘s Brian Feldman called the song “the Internet’s Halloween anthem”, and that same year, Rolling Stone‘s E. J. Dickson referred to the song as the “Halloween meme” of Generation Z. In 2021, Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post ranked the song number two on her list of the 50 best Halloween songs of all time.
Gold put the song on his album “Halloween Howls”, an album solely consisting of Halloween themed music. He played all of the instruments on the album! Of course, the song has been remixed, put into different formats, had different videos added to accompany it, but it’s quickly become a popular and favorite song. It’s one of my 10 year daughter’s favorite songs! The video that the song is paired with is actually a Disney animation from the 1930’s!
It seems like after Christmas songs, Halloween is definitely the season with the next largest amount of songs. It’s an interesting thing to ponder why, outside of Christmas, having songs about spooky things is the next most predominant on the list. Why do you think that is?
What do you think of the song? Comment with what you think! Happy haunting!
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