Fake Bands, Real Songs: The 50 Best Tunes by Made-Up Musicians

On record, the Brady Bunch made the Partridge Family sound like the Beatles. But they had their moments of goopy pop glory, like the fizzy “It’s a Sunshine Day” and “Time to Change.” In the episode “Dough-Re-Mi,” older brother Greg, channeling the eco and rock movements of the time, writes a save-the-planet anthem, “We Can Make the World a Whole Lot Brighter.” Just as the family band is about to cut it, though, middle brother Peter’s voice starts to crackle as adolescence kicks in. Instead of kicking Peter out of the band, Greg, apparently on a creative roll, comes up with “Time to Change,” which uses Peter’s vocal hiccup as its hook (along with lyrics like “Every boy’s a man inside”). Alas, that version is only heard on the series; the recorded rendition dispenses with that wacky hook altogether. Too bad — it’s the closest the Bradys got to maybe not the Beatles but Joe Cocker. —D.B.

Modeled off Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch” and “a bunch of Paris Hilton stuff,” Alexis Rose’s “A Little Bit Alexis” was written by Annie Murphy (who plays the broke heiress on the Canadian hit Schitt’s Creek) along with her real-life musician husband, Menno Versteeg, and his old bandmate Nick Boyd. That Alexis had a brief, “critically reviewed” reality show called A Little Bit Alexis was a detail show creator Dan Levy came up with when he was sketching out the character, according to an exhaustive oral history of the song in Elle,; the fact that its title track made it into the show’s fifth season was pure chance. But while the ridiculous earworm might have started as a joke, it quickly took on a life of its own, inspiring countless TikToks, gay club ragers, and even an authorized video. “We set out to make a song you want to do spin class to,” Versteeg told Elle. Love that journey for them. —E.G.P.

In the Documentary Now! episode “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee,” Chuck Klosterman points out the dichotomy at the heart of early yacht rockers the Blue Jean Committee (played by Fred Armisen and Bill Hader): They “wrote about living in California while residing in Chicago.” The title track of BJC’s most famous (and final) album sounds an awful lot like Steely Dan, another group whose core duo came from a colder climate yet managed to make quintessentially mellow music. The lyrics are much slighter than anything Donald Fagen or Walter Becker wrote, but it’ll make you feel the titular wind all the same. —A.S.

In its initial form, “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” was just an eight-second cutaway gag in an episode of 30 Rock: Tracy shows off his gold record for a Halloween novelty song, and then we get a brief snippet of the music video, with writers Robert Carlock and Tami Sagher each contributing a line (and as usual with 30 Rock songs, Jeff Richmond composing the music). But the brief joke quickly proved so popular that a longer version was written, with help on multiple levels from then-30 Rock writer Donald Glover, who contributed a few lyrics and performed much of the bonus material, doing a Tracy Morgan impression. It’s not exactly Childish Gambino 1.0, but the longer version places the cynicism of these kinds of cynical cash-in songs into a ludicrous earworm context.—A.S.

In what’s easily the greatest How I Met Your Mother episode of them all, “Slap Bet,” the gang becomes fixated on figuring out why Cobie Smulders’ Robin refuses to go to any shopping malls. Various theories are floated, andBarney naturally assumes it’s porn-related. In the end, it turns out to be far more scandalous: Robin was a teen pop star in Canada (a cross of Tiffany and a young Alanis), and her big hit was “Let’s Go to the Mall.” The lyrics areat times hilariously simplistic and on the nose —an amused Lily asks, “So, just to be clear, you wanted everybody to go to the mall … today?” —and at others wonderfully clever in their Canadian-ness. (The full version has references to both Wayne Gretzky and former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.) It’s not hard to understand why Robin Sparkles was a sensation for a hot minute above the 49th Parallel. —A.S.

Sparkle was Whitney Houston’s favorite childhood movie: the tragic 1976 tale of a Harlem girl group, starring Lonette McKee, Irene Cara, and Philip Michael Thomas. It’s the rise and fall of Sister and the Sisters, three actual sisters — Sparkle, Sister, and Dolores — who fight their way out of poverty to stardom, only to get dragged down by men and drugs. (There was a 2012 remake with Houston, her final project.) In the movie, the trio’s big showstopper is “Something He Can Feel,” written by Curtis Mayfield, sung by the actresses themselves. Aretha Franklin had a hit with it. So did Nineties R&B queens En Vogue — they paid homage by remaking the Sparkle scene for their MTV video, with gowns and long gloves. Even Afrika Bambaata did this tune, with vocals from Boy George. —R.S.

Though The Simpsons have featured dozens upon dozens of great songs over its long run, very few of them qualify here. Periodically, though, we’ll see a member of the Simpson family get involved in the music industry, like Bart joining a boy band that’s secretly a U.S. Navy recruitment tool, Homer managing a country singer who has a crush on him, or a college-age Homer fronting a grunge band called Sadgasm. But the pick has to be from the series’ note-perfect Beatles-parody episode, “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet.” A loving riff on the Fab Four’s history finds Homer, Barney, Apu, and Principal Skinner briefly becoming Eighties musical stars with their mix of throwback melodies and au courant subject matter. Maybe their song about Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was misguided, but Homer’s tribute to the omnipresent rear-windshield decal deservedly won a Grammy for Outstanding Soul, Spoken Word, or Barbershop Album of the Year. And it led to Homer meeting George Harrison, even if all he cared about was where the Quiet Beatle got a delicious-looking brownie. —A.S.

The 1970 Russ Meyer trash classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls tells the tale of a band living on the edge: The Carrie Nations. Dolly Read stars as Kelly, the singer of a three-woman garage-punk group that goes to Hollywood, changes its name to the Carrie Nations, and gets sucked into a Hollywood vortex of sex, drugs, and psychedelic sleaze. The screenwriter? A young Roger Ebert. (He really should have won his Pulitzer for poetry like, “You’re a groovy boy — I’d like to strap you on sometime!”) But the Carrie Nations bash out tough rockers like “Find It” and “Sweet Talkin’ Candy Man” — written by Stu Philips, vocals by Lynn Carey and Barbara Robison. They didn’t have many real-world counterparts at the time and became a cult legend as a female group playing instruments. So they’re the rare example of a fictional band inspiring real bands. “Oh, my God, we used to do songs from the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is just an iconic, classic B-movie,” Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles said. “It was a big influence on us.” —R.S.

Walk Hard may have been a box-office bomb, but it’s garnered a massive cult following for how well it parodies the biopic genre and the early rock & roll it invokes. John C. Reilly is perfect as Dewey Cox, an amalgamation of a lot of fictional rock stars but most clearly imitating Johnny Cash. His nonsensical breakout hit “Walk Hard” is a stunning pastiche of Cash’s earliest hits, like “Ring of Fire,” and is a parody song so well-crafted you don’t even realize how silly the lyrics are. Reilly, producer Judd Apatow, and director Jake Kasdan contributed to writing the track, but their secret weapon was Marshall Howard Crenshaw, the rockabilly singer-songwriter who played Buddy Holly in La Bamba. While the rest of the soundtrack cuts go for slapstick, “Walk Hard” aims mores for the heartstrings, an edge that makes this spoof extra brilliant. —B.S.

Andy Dwyer’s Parks and Recreation group —also known as Scarecrow Boat, Fiveskin, Jet Black Pope, Nothing Rhymes with Orange, Everything Rhymes with Orange, and many other names —is for the most part a competent bar band heavily influenced by Dave Matthews and Hootie and the Blowfish. When commissioned to write a funeral song for Indiana’s beloved tiny horse Li’l Sebastian that is “5,000 times better than ‘Candle in the Wind,’” Andy takes the assignment as literally as possible. But “5000 Candles in the Wind” — also known as “Bye Bye, Li’l Sebastian” —somehow transcends the silliness of its origins, and feels more joyous each time it’s performed over the life of the series. —A.S.

Fox’s Bob’s Burgers is no stranger to a great parody song. The show implements multiple brilliant little ditties throughout the series, often sung by the main characters during the closing credits. But the series’ best fake song is by Boyz 4 Now, a boy band so sweet and cute that they break the usually unflappable Louise. Her crush on floppy-haired band baby Boo Boo emerges when her sister, the perpetually horny Tina, drags her to a concert that unlocks a new side of the bunny-ear-wearing kid (“Cut me open! I’m infected!” she exclaims). Boyz 4 Now pop up a few times throughout the show, including a family viewing of their music video for “I Love You So Much (It’s Scary).” The horror-themed song and visual are inspired by both “Thriller” and Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” with a series of perfectly placed spooky jokes in quick yet still saccharine succession. —B.S.

When the three-piece rock band Sunset Curve died after eating hot dogs served to them from a questionable vehicle, they missed out on the chance of performing the biggest show of their career. And when high schooler Julie Molina’s mother died, she couldn’t find it in herself to play music ever again. In a way, their coming together as Julie and the Phantoms in the short-lived Netflix series of the same name offered them all a second chance. Performed in Julie’s garage, “Edge of Great” opens quietly as a faux-piano ballad. As she charges into the guitar-driven pop chorus, the band’s Luke, Alex, and Reggie appear like holograms — with cameras set up to explain how a group of ghosts only become visible to the living world with the stroke of a guitar chord. “We all got a second act inside of us,” they offer. Netflix scrapped the coming-of-age series less than a year after its 2020 premiere, so we’ll never know what that second act would have yielded, but it did part with the message that maybe there is a silver lining to everything. —L.P.

There’s never been a faux Elvis in the movies quite like Val Kilmer. He was a total unknown when he starred in Top Secret!, the 1984 spy caper from Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, right between Airplane! and The Naked Gun. Top Secret! is a feast of their trademark gags: “I know a little German — he’s sitting over there!” Val gets mixed up in Cold War espionage as the Elvis-style teen idol Nick Rivers. (Why is he named Nick? “My dad thought of it while he was shaving.”) “I was fresh out of Hamlet-land and the Julliard School,” Kilmer recalled. “I took it all way too seriously.” Kilmer is even funnier playing a rock star in The Doors, though his hilarious “Jim Morrison” character is technically ineligible for this list. —R.S.

The Banana Splits were the grooviest band from the era of psychedelic-kiddie TV. A Fab Four of funky animals: Fleegle the dog, Bingo the gorilla, a stoner lion named Drooper, and Snorky, because every band needs an elephant. They were a Hanna-Barbera creation, with costumes by Sid & Marty Krofft, who became 1970s kingpins of Saturday-morning classics like Lidsville and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. But the Banana Splits’ music was mind-bending bubblegum pop, devised by the finest L.A. studio pros. “Doin’ the Banana Split” came from an up-and-coming R&B talent named Barry White, while “The Tra La La Song” was catchy enough for Bob Marley to steal. “I Enjoy Being a Boy” could be a lost garage-rock classic from Nuggets, with trippy lyrics like “I live in a cucumber castle/By the bank of a cranberry sea.” —R.S.

There are so many classic Muppet songs from TV and film. But keeping with the spirit of this assignment, we had to pick one featuring The Muppet Show house band —or, as we meet them in the feature-length Muppet origin story The Muppet Movie, as a group trying to convert an old church into a coffeehouse. Jim Henson conceived of the Electric Mayhem as a mashup of various Sixties influences (Dr. Teeth is Dr. John, Floyd Pepper is Beatlesque, etc.), and all of them are on display in the delightful, psychedelic “Can You Picture That?” —A.S.

This pop-rock bop was penned by Matthew Tishler, Shane Stevens, and Maria Christensen for the 2011 movie Lemonade Mouth. It’s the Disney Channel equivalent of Katy Perry’s “Roar,”sung by Mo (Naomi Scott) and performed by the titular band. After breaking up with her musician boyfriend (Nick Roux) because he doesn’t take her music as seriously as she does, Mo and her band, Lemonade Mouth, play this empowerment anthem for a thrilled crowed, and a metamorphosis takes place. “You can look but you won’t see/The girl I used to be/’Cause she’s so gone” Mo sings while staring at her reflection in a napkin holder as her ex watches on. The perfect-daughter/doormat-girlfriend/shy-girl is transformed into an independent rock star who knows her worth and believes in her dreams. —T.K.

Stillwater walked so Daisy Jones & the Six could stage-dive. It’s a herculean task to make a fictional rock band look believable, let alone good. You can thank Nancy Wilson, who wrote “Fever Dog,” for this — it’s basically the male version of “Crazy on You.” In the world of Almost Famous, it’s the band’s first self-produced single, instead of studio legend Glyn Johns. And the magic is there: Jeff Bebe’s Robert Plant-like howl hits Russell Hammond’s guitar like a groovy train wreck. As teenage rock critic William Miller tells the band, it’s incendiary. —A.M.

Gender identity and the Berlin Wall collide in Hedwig and the Angry Inch opener, “Tear Me Down,” which sees the titular character performing in front of an audience of unimpressed Germans in a sleazy dive after the wall finally fell. The play-come-film follows Hedwig’s journey from gay, German teen Hansel Schmidt to frontwoman Hedwig to mentor of aspiring rocker Tommy Gnosis, who just so happens to steal her songs. Cooked up in New York drag clubs, the play and film were written by Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell, who originated the starring role. A glam-rock-infused musical inspired by the likes of David Bowie and Lou Reed, Hedwig has continued to find new audiences decades later, most recently in teen show Riverdale, which dedicated an episode to it. “The episode is about teenagers breaking away. And that’s what Hedwig is about — breaking away from the binary worlds of straight and gay or cis or trans or male and female,” Trask previously told Rolling Stone. —B.E.

Is a fictionalized gospel song blasphemous? This climactic ode to divine love and forgiveness from the 2003 musical comedy The Fighting Temptations is so serene it must slide. Performed in the film by Walter Williams Sr. of the O’Jays, Beyoncé Knowles, and a choir ensemble of ragtag small-towners under the deceptive (but eventually genuine) leadership of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Darrin Hill, “He Still Loves Me” is the subtle power of contemporary gospel, with modern production and knowing, old-school soul. “I ain’t no superstar, the spotlight ain’t shinin’ on me,” goes the hook. “Cuz I ain’t good enough, but He still loves me.” —M.C.

In the charming romantic comedy Music & Lyrics, Hugh Grant plays a fictionalized equivalent of Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! —an Eighties sensation left behind when his former partner hit it big as a solo artist. He now makes a living as a songwriter, and when commissioned by pop diva Haley Bennett to write her a hit on a 48-hour deadline, he’s startled to realize that Sophie (Drew Barrymore), the woman who waters his houseplants, has a real gift as a lyricist. Any film about the art of songwriting —and where we hear multiple versions of Alex and Sophie’s composition, in various arrangements and states of development —needs a very convincing, sturdy, and versatile tune to justify its own existence. Fortunately, Adam Schlesinger’s ballad “Way Back Into Love” is more than up to the challenge, even when we hear Cora’s attempt to transform it into a more sexually aggressive number with large helpings of Indian flavor. By the time Cora and Alex duet on a proper version of it at her concert, the audience should be well and truly sick of the song. But such was Schlesinger’s gift that it works well every time. —A.S.

For the most part, Daisy Jones & The Six underwhelms when it comes to crafting songs that would make the band plausible as a Fleetwood Mac-level phenomenon circa Rumors. There is one exception, and it comes at the end of the final episode that dropped today: “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb),” presented as the first collaboration between Six frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) and solo artist Daisy Jones (Riley Keough). Written by Blake Mills, Jason Boesal, Stephony Smith, Johnathan Rice, and Marcus Mumford, the harmonies are infectious, impressively performed by Claflin and Keough. (The latter has DNA on her side: she’s Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.) It’s also the series’ most blatantly Mac-sounding track, particularly in a guitar solo that sounds only a few DNA strands removed from “The Chain.” But when those two are leaning into the same mic and trading verses and lustful glances, you can imagine that The Six really were the biggest band in the world for a minute. (Though the commercially-released version is a bit less impressive than the version we first hear Billy and Daisy record on the show.) –A.S.

This list features several Oscar winners for Best Original Song. Robert Altman’s 1975 Americana opus Nashville has one of those, in Keith Carradine’s intimate romantic tune “I’m Easy.” We’re partial, though, to the film’s closing number, where wannabe country singer Winifred (Barbara Harris) takes the microphone after Nashville superstar Barbara Jean is horrifically shot during a political-campaign rally. In this particular context, the excellent Carradine-penned anthem “It Don’t Worry Me” —and the way the crowd shifts from shock to enthusiasm the longer Winifred keeps going — plays as something of a sick joke. But it also speaks to music’s power to help its listeners cope with difficult emotions. You may watch the closing credits feeling slightly queasy about how things went down at the rally, but dammit if you won’t also be humming that tune. —A.S.

The best song in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is arguably the Clash at Demonhead’s “Black Sheep,” but that’s Brie Larson covering a pre-existing Metric tune. (The original soundtrack release just featured Metric’s version.) The sloppy guitar rock of the Beck-written “We Are Sex Bob-omb” isn’t too far behind, creating the perfect opening number to bring you into Edgar Wright’s exuberant adaptation of Brian Lee O’Malley’s cult-classic comic book about garage bands, evil exes, video-game fights, and the power of self-respect. —A.S.

In A Goofy Movie, a deeply underrated Disney classic from 1995, Powerline is an absolute idol to the teen creatures that populate the film, and for good reason. Voiced by real teen heartthrob Tevin Campbell, Powerline is a cool and righteous blend of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Bobby Brown in walking, talking, jamming, cartoon-dog form. He’s performing “I2I” at a huge concert in L.A. at the climax of a film, where he, unbeknownst to the star, is at the center of all of the problems that its central character, Max, Goofy’s son, creates for himself. Luckily, they’re solved by Max and Goofy finessing their way onstage for “I2I,” a track that lives up to the discographies of the real-life superstars who inspired it. —M.C.

Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Paula Pell, and Busy Philipps play a one-hit-wonder girl group trying to recapture all their teen-sensation glory. Every episode is absolutely chock full of memorable songs. But the raucous anthem “B.P.E.,” from Season Two, has everything you’d ever want in a fictional-band banger: choir-like harmonies; hilariously inspiring lyrics (“Square feet/I’m going for miles/Upgrade/Taking up the aisles/Open up those classified files/From the Department of Treasury/Big Pussy Energy”); a midsong Goldsberry rap reminiscent of her awe-inspiring number “Satisfied” in Broadway’s Hamilton. And don’t sleep on the killer remix. It’s B.P.E., y’all! —L.T.

Around the time Alice Cooper and David Bowie became megastars, comedians Cheech and Chong were also riding high (pun intended). For their 1974 LP, Wedding Album, the duo dreamt up Alice Bowie, a privileged brat of a rock star who knows only three chords — which, incidentally, comprise a guitar riff worthy of both Black Sabbath and King Crimson. “It don’t bother me if people think I’m ‘funny,’” Cheech Marin’s Bowie character sings, “‘Cause I’m a big rock star and I’m makin’ lots of money.” The bit was so hilarious that the duo included it in the 1978 film Up in Smoke, in which Marin wore a pink tutu and Mickey Mouse ears. The tune’s legend has echoed ever since, with Soundgarden, Korn, and Rollins Band covering it and 2 Live Crew and Eminem sampling it. “It was just of the times,” Chong once said. “We wrote it back when rock stars were making lots of money and only knew three chords.” —K.G.

Oscar Isaac’s title character of Inside Llewyn Davis asks for an independent-contractor fee for his performance on this novelty song, forgoing potential royalties because he’s desperate for cash. But Llewyn also obviously thinks it’s garbage, derisively asking his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) who wrote it; a hurt Jim admits that he did. (In reality, Timberlake co-wrote it with Ed Rush, George Cromarty, T Bone Burnett, and the Coen brothers.) We thinkLlewyn is giving “Please Mr. Kennedy” short shrift. Yes, it’s gimmicky, particularly with Adam Driver’s Al interjecting throughout in a cartoonishly deep voice. Yes, it could really only exist at this moment when the dawn of the Space Race converged with the height of the folk era. But it’s also catchy as hell. As Burnett said later, “It is a joke song, but here’s the thing … even if a song is supposed to be bad in a film, it still has to be great.” —A.S.

Decades before “All About that Bass,” the comedians behind 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap mastered the bass-as-ass metaphor on “Big Bottom,” a track off their heavy-metal parody band Spinal Tap’s fictitious 1973 album Brainhammer. The three musicians — David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) — each played “lead bass” on the tune, the title of which doubles as a way of describing bass while singing double-entendres like “The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’” and “How could I leave this behind?” In a movie with many hilarious tracks, “Big Bottom” has become the gift that keeps on giving: Soundgarden frequently played it live, queercore group Pansy Division changed its genders, and Spinal Tap even got to perform it at Live Earth in 2007 with help from members of Foo Fighters, Metallica, and Beastie Boys, among “every bass player in the known universe.” —K.G.

The Partridge Family were meta before it was cool, a fictional family band whose singles landed on pop radio as if they were an actual band. But there was a reason for that: those records were co-written by AM-radio-seasoned pros like Paul Anka, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and future Bruce Springsteen manager Mike Appel, and recorded with L.A.’s must-hire Wrecking Crew session players. The narrator of “I Think I Love You” doesn’t just think he’s in love; he knows it, even to the point of screaming it into his pillow, and David Cassidy, as lead-singer heartthrob Keith, puts his all into his vocal. It’s also a miniature bubblegum symphony, from its opening bah-bah-bah chant to its drop-down bridge to the moment when Cassidy gets so wrapped up in it that he starts singing “Wha think I love you!” at the end. —D.B.

Nashville, the soapy and sorely missed 2012-18 series set in that industry town, got plenty of things right about the music business: shady A&R executives running amok, veterans (especially women) struggling to stay relevant, a male singer wrestling with whether to come out. But the series also nailed the sound of modern country, in large part thanks to actual Music City tunesmiths hired to write songs for the show’s fictional characters. It’s easy to imagine hearing frisky, post-Shania stompers and weepers written for Rayna Janes (Connie Britton) and Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) on country radio. The genre’s incorporation of soft-rock sensitivity couldn’t have been better captured than it was on “When the Right One Comes Along.” A showcase for Gunnar and Scarlett, the obvious couple who keep avoiding each other, it’s featured in several different versions, including an orchestrated one. But it’s Gunnar’s sad-dude solo rendition — set at Nashville’s iconic Bluebird Cafe — that will make you want to cry, or at least get a little misty-eyed, in your beer. —D.B.

Set in 2002, Disney/Pixar’s 2022 film Turning Red takes viewers back to an era of spiky-haired boy bands. To tackle the heavy task of making a Max Martinesque pop song, Billie Eilish and brother Finneas were called upon to write the music for fictional boy band 4*Town. The pair went outside of their unique comfort zones to pay homage to the era, hitting all the right notes for what made ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys’ hits so huge in the early aughts: bass-heavy synths, angelic harmonies, and tummy-turning sweet nothings that would have any fan so excited that they, too, would transform into a giant red panda if they could. To become the absolutely adorable 4*Town, Finneas joined forces with Jordan Fisher, Josh Levi, Grayson Villanueva, and Topher Ngo, creating the perfect charm- and hormone-explosion. —B.S.

There is a tradition in a lot of the films and movies on this list to show a band improvising what instantly sounds like a fully formed song. Sometimes, it seems silly how easily the lyrics and arrangements come together. But when the song is as sharp and fiery as this kiss-off tune from Peacock’s excellent (but unfortunately little-seen) comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band in London, it’s hard to complain when you just want to hear more of it. —A.S.