When it was discovered today that Pharrell starts all of his songs the same way, it got me thinking about other artists who pulled similar tricks in multiple songs. It's one thing to have a signature sound, but these five artists pretty much wrote the same song two times (one artist even did it on the same album).
1. Yo La Tengo
Over the course of a single album, Yo La Tengo can shift from folk music to ambient to noise pop, and somehow it all works. However, two of the band's most famous noise pop songs, 1997's "Sugarcube" and 2000's "Cherry Chapstick," sound astonishingly alike. Both songs have fuzzy two-chord opening riffs, sweet melodies, and atonal guitar soloing over single-chord drones. "Cherry Chapstick" stretches on longer and has more of a focus on instrumental passages, but it almost sounds like a conscious attempt to write "Sugarcube" a second time.
2. The White Stripes
Country and blues are fundamentally simple styles of music, so some repetition and sameness is inevitable. Even a band like the White Stripes, who put a unique and exciting spin on the genres, couldn't avoid writing two songs that feel like variations of the same thing. Both 2002's "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," and 2003's "There's No Home For You Here," are based around A G C A chord progressions ("Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" takes a quick detour to D) and follow the "loud chorus/quiet verse" formula. The melodies are different, but the chords and structures too similar to be ignored.
3. Cream
If you're in a band with two songwriters, and both end up writing a song with the same chord progression, how do you resolve this? In Cream's case, they simply recorded both songs. 1967's "Tales of Brave Ulysses," written by Eric Clapton, is based around a descending chord progression in D minor, which is almost the exact same progression as Jack Bruce's "White Room" the following year. It also doesn't help matters that both songs feature distinctive wah pedal action from Clapton.
4. Neil Young
If you're a bigger fan of Neil Young's grungy rock sound than his acoustic folk sound, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is probably your favorite Neil Young album. It features two of Young's most famous guitar workouts: "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," two country-rock songs over nine minutes that feature extensive improvised soloing over two-chord jams and close out both sides of the record.
5. King Crimson
King Crimson didn't merely write the same song twice: it practically wrote the same album twice. Both In the Court of the Crimson King and In the Wake of Poseidon (similar titles, too) have quirky proto-metal songs featuring saxophone, followed by placid pop songs featuring flutes, followed by epic prog ballads featuring mellotron, not to mention additional mellotron heavy pieces towards the end. In particular, "Pictures of a City" is so tonally and structurally similar to "21st Century Schizoid Man" that it almost seems like a parody.
