Is Goo Goo Dolls’ Better Days a Christmas song?

Doing a little light holiday data baking on Christmas Eve, I was surprised to learn that Goo Goo Dolls’ Better Days is considered a Christmas song, at least by the keepers of this list at Wikipedia.

The song, the first single off their eighth studio album Let Love In, was released as a single in September 2005 and made it to No. 36 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and to No. 5 on Nielsen’s Soundscan in Canada.

The video, shot at Malibu Creek State Park in California’s Santa Monica Mountains, has nary a Christmas accoutrement. No twinkling lights, no decorated coniferous trees, not even any “boxes wrapped in strings” as John Rzeznik sings in the first verse. It looks more like an episode of Sleepy Hollow.

Watch the video on YouTube

The words do suggest an end-of-the-year reflection on the state of things, whether personal or about the world at large.

And you ask me what I want this year
And I try to make this kind and clear
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days
Cuz I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings
And desire and love and empty things
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

I need someplace simple where we could live
And something only you can give
And thats faith and trust and peace while we’re alive
And the one poor child who saved this world
And there’s 10 million more who probably could
If we all just stopped and said a prayer for them

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

I wish everyone was loved tonight
And somehow stop this endless fight
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

So take these words
And sing out loud
Cuz everyone is forgiven now
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again
Cuz tonight’s the night the world begins again

This whole dive was prompted by a tweet from Kaggle on Christmas Eve day highlighting a new dataset called “Billboard Top 100 Christmas Carol Dataset”. Its author, Sean Gilbert, said the data was a marriage of his Billboard chart data, which lists every song that appeared on the premier chart between 1958 and 2017, and the aforementioned Wikipedia list of Christmas songs.

I attempted to replicate his merge of the two files and came up with a slightly different final set, although the differences were mostly in the additional versions of songs called Amen in his list, not all of which were remakes of The Impressions’ original. (I reported this in the dataset’s Discussion page.)

In trying to reproduce the data, it appeared that he was limiting his data the times those songs charted in November, December, the obvious holiday months, and January, to capture any latent chart popularity.

As mentioned above, Better Days was released as a single on Sept. 20, 2005. Here’s a plot of its chart appearances (readers on mobile may have to flip their phones sideways to view the following charts and tables):

It’s interesting that the song peaked in its second week and was headed out of the chart in early November. But then it found a second wave, riding a new surge back up to No. 48. In the Goo Goo Dolls’ canon, it’s among the eight songs that spent at least 20 weeks on the Hot 100 chart.