I’ve always enjoyed the excitement of playing music trivia with friends and colleagues. Like when I’m at a sporting event with friends and a song comes over the loudspeaker, I’ll say, “OK, who sings this one”? Or when I’m dealing cards at a funny money casino night, I ask the players to identify the artist in exchange for some free chips. It’s always fun and everyone enjoys the challenge of answering trivia on the spot for a payout.

So when I decided to write this book–What’s in That Song?–200 Music Trivia Questions Where the Answer Are in the Lyrics–I thought I’d take the concept of Name That Tune or Name That Band and take it up another level. Like if I asked, “Who sings ‘Piano Man’”? That’s too easy, not challenging, and no fun.

However, if I asked, “In ‘Piano Man,’ what is the old man sitting next to Billy Joel drinking”? Well, now you have to delve into the lyrics of the song to find the answer, which is, of course, tonic and gin.

And that’s what this book is about. You read the questions, and you run back the songs in your head to get to the answers. And these are not obscure songs, they’re not Jeopardy-style questions designed only for music insiders. The songs are all hits that you’ve listened to countless times and have no doubt sung along to.

How did I get to the point of writing a book about music trivia? The idea came to me as I was working in my home office. Back in my days as a textbook editor, one of my duties would be to write end-of-chapter questions based on the material of that chapter.

Now working from home, I often have the radio playing in the background, as many office workers do. Most of the time I don’t even notice it. But sometimes during lulls, the songs break my concentration and, as we all do, I sing along to them in my head. From there, still in editor mode, I come up with trivia questions based on the lyrics. It’s a welcome respite from the assignment, fantasizing that I’m an emcee in a music quiz show.

It wasn’t all one big music festival, though; there was a lot of digging and analyzing that went into creating the questions. Some questions were changed because they didn’t read well in question format, others needed to be scrapped altogether. Not every well-known song has a question inside its lyrics.

Once a song was settled on, I needed to verify the lyrics were correct (who can forget that in “Bad Moon Rising” many people thought Credence Clearwater Revival was singing there’s a bathroom on the right instead of there’s a bad moon on the rise). Referencing www.azlyrics.com came in quite handy.

This site even set me straight on a lyrical error I’d been making for years. I always thought David Bowie’s “Modern Love” went it’s not really work, it’s just the power to talk, when in fact it’s not really work, it’s just the power to charm. Besides verifying lyrical accuracy, I also had to include the songs’ credit citations.

As I started putting the book together, I first settled on 100 questions. But when I completed the last question, there were so many more songs that I didn’t get to, so I decided to produce 100 more.

There’s a wide variety of songs here. Some songs are from the recent past, others go back decades. Some questions were curated from songs on Top 100 or 500 lists, but most of them were simply from listening to Sirius radio. There’s something in here for most everyone.

This book is for anyone who listens to music, which is pretty much all of us. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. One danger is you may get a song stuck in your head after going over some of the lyrics. Can’t help you there. You’ve been warned.