Last Night is the third single from Morgan Wallen’s second album, One Thing At A Time (2023). Co-written by Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome, Jacob Kasher and John Byron, and produced by Charlie Handsome and Joey Moi, the song is the first Hot 100 number one of Wallen’s career, and the first country song by a solo male artist to top the Hot 100 in 42 years.
It has been charting at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks and has reached the top spot on other charts including the Billboard Country Airplay and Hot Country Songs charts, and the Australia ARIA and Country Hot 50 charts. It also cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard Mainstream Top 40 chart.
Last Night's success is a result of the individual strengths and collaborative efforts of the writers and producers, along with Wallen’s ability to bring it to life. Together, they effectively balanced traditional country with mainstream pop and hip hop, connecting and resonating with a wide fan base while at the same time staying true to Wallen’s overall body of work.
Structurally, the song possesses a host of qualities that are in line with recent Hot 100 Top 10 trends. Among them are an easy-to-follow form, beginning with an intro and concluding with an outro, the inclusion of a post-chorus, omission of a pre-chorus, and clocking in on the shorter-end of the spectrum, to name a few.
However, Last Night also goes against the grain in certain key areas. Two of the most notable are having its first chorus precede the first verse and the inclusion of a highly atypical chorus stanza 2 “D” section, as opposed to a much more common bridge.
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Last Night at-a-glance
- Artist: Morgan Wallen
- Songwriters: Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome, Jacob Kasher, John Byron
- Producers: Charlie Handsome, Joey Moi
- Mastering Engineer: Ted Jensen
- Mixer: Joey Moi
- Record Label: Republic
- Primary Genre: Country
- Influences: Country, Hip Hop/Rap, Pop, Rock
- Length: 2:39
- Form: I-B-A-B-VB-A-B-VB-O
- Key: F# Major
- Tempo: 102 BPM
- Prominent Instruments: Bass (Synth), Guitar (Acoustic), Guitar (Electric), Snaps
- Primary Lyrical Themes: Love/Relationships
Hit Songs Deconstructed just released the first segment of Last Night Deconstructed, which focuses on the song's structure and genre/influence fusion techniques. Stay tuned for the next five segments (published every two weeks) including Instruments and Arrangement, Energy and Dynamics, Vocal Melody and Vocal Production, Lyrics and Rhymes, and Benchmark, Highlights & Takeaways.
Subscribers can read the full analysis here.
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Hit Song Deconstructions
A Library of 60+ Hit Songs Deconstructed Reports
The Hit Song Deconstructed reports provide unparalleled analysis of today's hits.
Each deconstruction breaks down a current hit to its foundational building blocks and pulls back the curtain on the patterns and science behind how the song was written, produced and arranged.
Leaving no stone unturned, everything is presented in a clear and concise manner and is complimented with unique Hit Songs Deconstructed visualizations that can be used to assess your own songs for strengths and weaknesses as well.
Among them are the HSD melodic parts tables and graphs, rhyme scheme tables, narrative structure tables, energy graphs, and more.
Each report is published in ten segments every two weeks, and analyzes structure, genres and sub-genre fusion, instruments and arrangement, energy and dynamics, vocal melody, vocal production, lyrics, and rhymes. The last segment features a top 10 benchmark and highlights the most important report takeaways.
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Using empty MIDI regions to visualize the instrumental arrangement, energy, vocal melody and production, structure, select techniques and more, these DAW projects provide you with a visual roadmap for understanding how today’s hits were effectively arranged.
By watching as you listen, you will gain valuable insight into the strategic decisions today’s hitmakers made to help prime their songs for maximum impact, giving you a host of new tools, techniques, and ideas to help take your own songs to the next level.
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Fuel your inspiration with the techniques that helped today’s most successful songs become global hits!
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Every Tuesday, you’ll receive an expertly curated technique that has been deconstructed by the Hit Songs Deconstructed team to study. Each technique is accompanied by a detailed explanation, visual aids, and audio clips revealing the what, the why, and the how behind them.
It's the perfect way to continuously hone your craft and incorporate techniques from current chart-toppers into your own music.
Techniques include: Hook Techniques, Intro Techniques, Outro Techniques, Duet/Group Lead Vocal Structure Techniques, Audience Participation Moment Techniques, Energy Techniques, Section Impact Accentuator Techniques, Sub-Genre Fusion Techniques, Chorus Vocal Structure Techniques, Departure Section Techniques, Prosody Techniques, and Rhyme Techniques (with more technique categories to come!)
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Round out your toolbox with songwriting analytics for today's most successful songs.
Looking for insight into what today's hits have in common? Or want to spot trends on the rise, or in decline? Or need to back up gut feelings with factual data?
This powerful, fully interactive database provides you with critical insight into how the current musical landscape is evolving with valuable, real-time intelligence on the compositional characteristics of the songs that land in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.
Hundreds of different searches keep you in tune with what’s driving the Hot 100 Top 10 at the compositional level. Trends are visualized with graphs and tables with each data point linking to a list of the corresponding songs.
Search for trends pertaining to primary genres, sub-genres/influences, instruments, lead vocals (gender, vocal delivery, etc.), lyrics (lyrical theme, title placement and appearances, etc.), song structure (key, tempo, song length, song form, etc.), song sections (intro characteristics, first chorus occurrence, post-chorus types, etc.), and much more.
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This powerful tool gives you the ability to compare and contrast any of the compositional characteristics in The Immersion Database across songs, artists, songwriters, producers and labels.
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Trend searches include number of songs in the Top 10, weeks in the Top 10, trends for featured artist, genre breakdown, team size, and more.
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All search results include links to the corresponding songs and profile pages.
Artist, Songwriter, Producer and Label Database
Stay in tune with the artists, writers, producers, and labels behind today’s hits and the trends behind them.
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Hit Songs Deconstructed Trend Reports
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Today’s hits are changing faster than ever, from the songwriting and production techniques used to craft them to the influences and instruments shaping their sound. To stay ahead of the curve, it's critical to proactively stay on top of what's driving today’s most successful songs at the compositional level. The Hit Songs Deconstructed trend reports deliver an easy-to-digest snapshot of the trends driving the Hot 100 top 10.
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A deconstruction of the most recent quarter's new arrivals, and how they differ from the songs that carried over from the previous quarter.
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This report delivers an in-depth look at trends for all the compositional categories we track, including primary genres, sub-genres, lead vocals, lyrical themes, instruments, key, tempo, song length, song structure, and much more.
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A deconstruction of the compositional characteristics that are unique to songs that chart for 10+ weeks in the top 10..
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