Songfacts®:

• Joni Mitchell wrote a song about Woodstock without attending the festival, and Train lead singer Pat Monahan wrote this one about Burning Man without ever setting foot in the Nevada desert.
  
  Some of his friends were going, and he was intrigued by the festival, which culminates with a huge effigy set ablaze. Monahan imagined beautiful women dancing around the flames and came up with the lyric about an unforgettable girl who blows his mind.
• Train had a hit in 2001 with "Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me)" and another in 2003 with "Calling All Angels," but then they derailed, with Monahan going through a divorce and losing a good friend to suicide. He poured his heart out on their 2006 album For Me, It's You, but no hits came of it, and the group went on hiatus.
  
  When they returned to make their 2009 Save Me San Francisco album, they filled it with upbeat pop songs, the poppiest being "Hey Soul Sister," which was the first single. Train was once again on track and back on the charts.
• According to Pat Monahan, he wrote this song and "If It's Love" the same day in New York City after a few days of little sleep. Monahan says that when he doesn't sleep, he does better work, and when "Hey Soul Sister" came to him, it was quick and easy.
• Since their name conveniently rhymes with "sister," in the chorus Monahan namechecks Mr. Mister, a group known for their hits "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings."
• Musically, the special sauce in this song is the ukulele. "The ukulele made everybody happy," Monahan told PopEater. "I think that along with the song itself and the melodies, people gravitate towards that positive part of it. The ukulele made a big difference."
• The Save Me San Francisco album was the first time Train brought in outside writers. "Hey Soul Sister" is a collaboration between Pat Monahan and the Norwegian songwriting duo Espionage, whose previous writing credits include "Irreplaceable" for Beyoncé and "With You" for Chris Brown. After working together on the writing and recording of the track "Brick by Brick," Monahan decided to record another track with Espionage. The Train frontman recalled to The Erie Times: "I said, 'I want to write an INXS-y song.' So, they started playing kind of an INXS-y song, and I wrote the song 'Hey, Soul Sister' to it and the melodies and started to sing it. And I was like, 'Man, this just doesn't sound great to me.'
  
  One of the guys, Espin, who's like a huge star in Norway, picked up a ukulele, and said, 'Hey, how about this?' I was like, 'Are you (kidding) me?' And it made the difference. It made my words dance. It made sense. These words were meant to dance with ukulele and not guitar." This presented a problem as it meant Train guitarist Jimmy Stafford would have to learn how to play ukulele. Stafford recalled: "At first, I tried to do it by using a guitar pick, and it didn't sound right. I had to go online and Google a ukulele lesson and noticed they're not using picks at all; it's more of a flamenco style. Once I got that down, then it sounded like the real deal."
• The album, which was produced by Martin Terfe (Jason Mraz, KT Tunstall) pays tribute to Train's hometown. Monahan told Billboard: "We owe all of our gratitude to San Francisco because they embraced us back when, if they hadn't have, no one would have."
• Lead singer Pat Monahan told Billboard magazine that this song, along with the rest of the album, marked a return to the group's folk-rock roots. He explained: "There's super catchy riffs and melodies in it, which I think are way more important that any production trick or great-sounding vocal production. It's kind of us going backward so we can go forward."
• The Madonna reference in the line "I believe in you, like a virgin, you're Madonna" is to the Virgin Mary, not the pop star.
• The song reached #1 in a number of countries including Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Thailand. It was also a #1 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart.
• The music video was shot outside of Chango, a coffeehouse on the corner of Echo Park Avenue and Delta Street in Los Angeles. The Olly Murs video for "Troublemaker" was also shot there.
• Released before streaming caught on but long after CDs fell out of favor, "Hey Soul Sister" racked up a remarkable 6 million downloads, becoming the most-downloaded song in Columbia Records history.
• The song was covered on the ninth episode of the second season of American musical television series Glee, titled "Special Education." The show was premiered on Fox in the United States on November 30, 2010, and sees the glee club enter the Sectionals round of the show choir competition. This version features a solo vocal from actor Darren Criss, who plays Blaine, an openly gay teen from rival glee club the Dalton Academy Warblers.
• This was the top-selling song of 2010 on iTunes. Katy Perry's "California Gurls" was the second-best seller and third was Eminem's "Love The Way You Lie."
• This song was skewered on Saturday Night Live in a 2024 skit set in 1955. Andrew Dismukes and Ego Nwodim play an interracial couple addressing their parents. Dismukes says he wrote a song "about what it's like to be married to a beautiful Black woman," and he launches into "Hey Soul Sister." The white parents enjoy the song; the Black parents, not so much, especially the line, "You're so gangster, I'm so thug."
• The Kidz Bop version of "Hey Soul Sister" plays in the premiere episode of the 2025 Hulu series Good American Family, which tells story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born girl with a rare form of dwarfism who was adopted by an American couple. The song is used in a scene where the family sings along to it in the car, before their lives take a bad turn.