Songs for a tenor voice
170 songs whose melody stays inside C3 to C5 from start to finish, out of 324 measured. Allow three semitones of transposition either way and it becomes 245.
Most rock and pop was written for this range, so the constraint is rarely whether a song fits. It is whether the top of it sits above your break, which this list cannot see. A song topping out at G4 is comfortable for one tenor and a wrestling match for another, and only you know which.
The list
Sorted by artist, showing 40 of 170. The two notes are where the melody spends its time, not the single highest and lowest note it touches.
| Song | Artist | Sits between |
|---|---|---|
| Does Your Mother Know | ABBA | G3 to G4 |
| I'm a Marionette | ABBA | E4 to A4 |
| Name of the Game | ABBA | A3 to B4 |
| Waterloo | ABBA | C#4 to B4 |
| Beautiful Life | Ace of Base | B3 to A4 |
| The Sign | Ace of Base | B3 to B4 |
| No Excuses | Alice in Chains | F3 to F#4 |
| Baby Baby | Amy Grant | B3 to C5 |
| Takin Care of Business | Bachman-Turner Overdrive | C4 to E4 |
| Feel Like Makin' Love | Bad Company | G#3 to G#4 |
| Ready For Love | Bad Company | A3 to A4 |
| Run With The Pack | Bad Company | C4 to A4 |
| One Week | Barenaked Ladies | C#4 to A4 |
| Copacabana | Barry Manilow | G#3 to C5 |
| Baby I Love Your Way | Big Mountain | E3 to F#4 |
| Big Shot | Billy Joel | G3 to D4 |
| The Longest Time | Billy Joel | F3 to F4 |
| What's My Age Again | blink-182 | F#3 to F4 |
| Always | Bon Jovi | G3 to A#4 |
| Bad Medicine | Bon Jovi | C#4 to A4 |
| Dans l'eau de la claire Fontaine | Brassens Georges | B3 to G4 |
| From the Bottom of My Broken Heart | Britney Spears | A3 to B4 |
| Whiskey Under the Bridge | Brooks & Dunn | E3 to F#4 |
| The Thunder Rolls | Brooks Garth | C3 to D4 |
| I Got You (I Feel Good) | Brown James | G#3 to F4 |
| I'm On Fire | Bruce Springsteen | C#4 to B4 |
| Heaven | Bryan Adams | B3 to G4 |
| Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven | Bryan Adams | B3 to A4 |
| Ci vuole un fisico bestiale | Carboni | D4 to C5 |
| Nobody Does It Better | Carly Simon | A3 to A#4 |
| Jambalaya (On the Bayou) | Carpenters | A#3 to A4 |
| Svalutation | Celentano | C#4 to A#4 |
| Pour que tu m'aimes encore | Celine Dion | C4 to B4 |
| Shoop Shoop Song | Cher | C4 to A4 |
| Higher | Creed | F#3 to E4 |
| Hey Tonight | Creedence Clearwater Revival | B3 to G#4 |
| Strong Enough | Crow Sheryl | B3 to A4 |
| Caruso | Dalla | A3 to C5 |
| Wij vieren feest | De Deurzakkers | E4 to C5 |
| Calling Elvis | Dire Straits | A3 to E4 |
See all 170, and set your own two notes
Why a voice type is a bad way to pick songs
A voice type is not a range. It is where your voice sits happily and where it changes gear, and two people called tenor can have their break in different places. A choir director put it to me more bluntly than that, and he was right. Using C3 to C5 as a filter is a starting point, not a verdict.
If you would rather work from your own two notes, the range test measures them in about a minute in the browser, then hands them straight to the full song list.
Where these numbers come from
They are read out of MIDI transcriptions from the Lakh MIDI Dataset, CC BY 4.0, by Colin Raffel. Human beings typed those melodies in by ear and about a fifth of the songs transcribed twice have versions that disagree by a whole octave. Only songs with two agreeing transcriptions and a range a voice can produce made it here. I also labelled all 214 acts by whether the lead singer is a man or a woman, and removed the 108 male-led songs sitting above B4, where no male pop singer spends a song. What is left still runs high on average for male voices, so a title here is a shortlist entry rather than a fact. The main page sets out the whole method.
Other voice types, bass, baritone, alto, mezzo-soprano, soprano.