Train's Pat Monahan Says Late Mom 'Delivered' Him 'All the Lyrics and Melodies' for 'Drops of Jupiter' While He Was Asleep

Meredith WilshereSun, February 22, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Pat Monahan of Train.

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Train's song "Drops of Jupiter" came out in January 2001, and is still beloved 25 years later

Monahan's mother died in 1998, but he says she "delivered" him all the "lyrics and melodies" while he was asleep

"I felt like my mom wrote that song with me," he told PEOPLE in 2025

Pat Monahan, the lead singer of Train, got inspiration for "Drops of Jupiter" from someone very special: his late mother.

The Grammy-winning musician recently joined Lynn Hoffman on the Music Saved Me podcast to talk about his decades-long career and how the hit 2001 song came to be. He explained that, after the band first gained traction with their 1998 hit "Meet Virginia" from their self-titled debut album, they were looking to piggyback off its success.

“We recorded an album called Something More and delivered it to Columbia Records. And they didn't think we had a first single," the 56-year-old explained. "I was emotionally not in the mood because I lost my mother just recently. And now I don't have a single for this record company."

Monahan's mother, Patricia Ann Monahan, died in December 1998 from lung cancer while the band was on tour.

Pat Monahan

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“One night, I went to sleep and probably was asleep for 10 minutes and woke up with all the lyrics and melodies in my head, as though my mother had delivered me the message, ‘This is what it's like when you go to the other side. You can swim through the planets and come back with drops of Jupiter in your hair, and don't worry about me,'" he recalled.

"Drops of Jupiter" was officially released as the lead single off the album of the same name on Jan. 29, 2001.

However, he noted that there was one particular part of the song that he didn't get from his mom.

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"So then with the [lyric] 'looking for yourself out there,' that was the emotional part of it for me, that was like... it somehow had to translate into a love story, and so that was, that was the little bit of something I gave to the song that maybe my mother didn't deliver,” Monahan added.

Pat Monahan

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Monahan admitted he was surprised the track did so well, saying that "there was no reason for that song to become a hit."

“It's the same thing as any other song that was big for us. Like, even ‘Meet Virginia’ was a quirky little song, and then a song with a ukulele," he said of his popular songs, referring to "Hey, Soul Sister."

"‘Drops of Jupiter' was like four minutes and 20 seconds or something at a time when there were, you know, two-and-a-half-minute songs on the radio,” Monahan added. "So it was pretty interesting that it happened."

When talking to PEOPLE in 2025, Monahan said he "felt like my mom wrote that song with me."

"We were kind of talking back and forth about [it]," he said.

on People

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”