The #1 Song on the Day You Were Born
every birthday since the charts began in 1958
Pick a date. We’ll tell you what was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 that week, back to the first chart in August 1958.
Then see the rest of the day
Every date has its own page: the #1 song, the top album, what was in theaters, what was on Netflix, and what people were looking up, for that day in every year since the charts began. Your birthday is a good place to start, and so is a parent’s, or the day you met someone.
The song was everyone’s. The day was yours.
A #1 song tells you what the whole country was humming. It doesn’t say who called that morning, what you ate, where you sat. Nobody wrote that down, so it’s gone, and most of us are fine with that for the day we were born.
It’s the other days that sting a little. The ordinary Tuesday last spring that was lovely and left no trace. Little Memory keeps those. It’s a little diary for your iPhone: one line about today, about fifteen seconds, and on this date next year, and every year after, it shows you what you wrote. Five years of it looks like this:
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
It’s free to download and private by default, and it has been in the App Store since 2011. If you’re more curious about the looking-back part, there’s a page on the on this day journal idea, and if a date is bugging you because you can’t remember what you did on it, there’s a page on piecing a day back together.
