Top 10 Songs Written in Less Than 10 Minutes

Some of the biggest songs ever recorded weren't born out of all-night studio sessions or agonized over for weeks. They just showed up. A riff hits during a soundcheck. A line drops into your head while you're in the shower. You grab a guitar, hum a few notes, and bam, lightning in under ten minutes.

This list is all about those moments of pure creative combustion. It's about the core of the song: the melody that carries it, the hook that sticks, or the lyric that gives it life. Not the final polish, not the mixing, not the five producers cleaning it up with Pro Tools. Just that raw, inspired chunk that makes the song what it is.

Some came from dreams. Others from boredom. A few from frustration. But whatever the fuel, the result was fast, furious, and ridiculously effective.

The Top Ten

Yesterday - The Beatles

Paul McCartney heard almost the entire melody in a dream, but he didn't believe it was his original melody. He wrote random lyrics about scrambled eggs and played the song for everyone he knew, asking if they had heard the melody before. But everyone said "no," and he eventually decided it was a new original song.
American Woman - The Guess Who

During a live jam in front of a paying audience, lead guitarist Randy Bachman broke a string. While waiting for the replacement string, he started playing a riff, and the rest of the band joined in, with singer Burton Cummings making up the lyrics on the spot.
The band noticed a fan with a cassette recorder in the crowd and asked for a copy of the tape, which they received. Thanks to it, they recreated the song almost note-for-note in the studio.
See You Again - Wiz Khalifa

Charlie Puth told the Los Angeles Times: "It just seemed to occur from out of nowhere. And basically 10 minutes later, Justin and I wrote it. We sent it off, and I thought we'd never hear about it again." The song was the soundtrack to Furious 7.

Too bad Paul Walker died in 2013. Everything changes.
What'd I Say - Ray Charles

Yes! I remember reading about that. He saw the audience responding very excitedly to the song and realized that he had struck gold. In my experience performing live, that's when you know you have a good song on your hands. If the audience is bored, you chuck it. But if the audience is excited, then you've got something great on your hands.

At a gig, he found himself 12 minutes short of material and began improvising.
Crazy Little Thing Called Love - Queen

Freddie Mercury composed it on the guitar in just five to ten minutes:
"'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' took me five or ten minutes. I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way, it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework. I couldn't work through too many chords, and because of that restriction, I wrote a good song, I think."
Laura Palmer's Theme - Angelo Badalamenti

This is the theme song for the TV show Twin Peaks. Director David Lynch only told Angelo Badalamenti what to think about in visual terms, and Angelo turned these "visual terms" into music in no time.
Photograph - Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran told Capital FM:
"I wrote it with Johnny from Snow Patrol and he just had a loop on his laptop that he just put down that was just a three-note piano thing. I just started singing over that, 'Loving can hurt, loving can hurt,' and then the song just kinda fell out within about 10 minutes."
Super Bass - Nicki Minaj

Ester Dean writes mainly hook lines, and she wrote the hooks for many popular songs, including this one. Ester Dean claims never to have spent more than five minutes on any one song. Ester told the New Yorker:
"I go into the booth, and I scream and sing and yell, and sometimes it's words, but most times it's not. And I just see when I get this little chill, here [touches her upper arm, just below the shoulder], and then I'm like, 'Yeah, that's the hook.'"
Hometown Glory - Adele

It was her first single and the first song she ever wrote.
Adele told BBC: "It was all about how I felt about London and stuff like that. I actually wrote it on guitar, and I was at school at the time. I got my friend at school to transpose it onto piano because I probably could play it, but it would probably take about 12 hours because I'm such a snail on the piano trying to sing and play at the same time."
Just Dance - Lady Gaga

Written by Lady Gaga, RedOne, and Akon. Lady Gaga told Heat magazine: "It's been unbelievable the way the song has crossed over into the mainstream. It took 10 minutes to write!"

The Newcomers

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The Show Must Go On - Pink Floyd
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Hail Mary - 2Pac

The Contenders

The Cave - Mumford & Sons

It was created during a soundcheck when guitarist Marcus Mumford started playing some guitar lines. The rest of the band joined him, and within minutes they had the essentials of this song. The song was nominated for four Grammy awards, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year.
Mis Disculpas - Residente
In the Summertime - Mungo Jerry
Cherry Pie - Warrant

I remember they wrote it in a restaurant when they were bored, writing on napkins. It probably took around 5 or 10 minutes to make.
Killshot - Eminem
Der Fahrkartenkontrolleur - Kollegah

Kollegah improvised this novelty song about a ticket collector on a train live during an interview, with his best friend and fellow rapper Farid Bang bursting out in laughter. Later on, he professionally recorded the one-minute song as a surprise present for Farid Bang. Only a few years later, it was made available to the wider public.
Fly Farm Blues - Jack White

Jack White created this song during the making of the movie "It Might Get Loud," after he and the director had an argument about how modern records are overproduced and overly thought out. He wrote and recorded it in about ten minutes, essentially coming up with the lyrics on the spot. While it's not the best example of these quickly made songs, it does demonstrate Jack's musical ethos - he almost always writes and records things relatively quickly to keep them fresh.