By the time the [lastfm link_type="artist_info"]Doors[/lastfm] reached the recording sessions for their third album, they were searching around for some new material. Old notebooks of Jim Morrison’s yielded the song, “Hello, I Love You.”

According to the book No One Gets Out of Here Alive (and quoted in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits), Morrison wrote “Hello, I Love You” one afternoon while sitting atop his Venice Beach apartment with Ray Manzarek, while the former still in grad school at UCLA. “Actually, I think the music came to my mind first,” said Morrison of how the song came about, “then I made up the words to hang on to the melody.”

“I could hear it and since I had no way of writing it down musically, the only way I could remember it was to try and get words to put to it.”

The birth of the song (as well as the album) was not an all together smooth process. An intemperate and often bored Morrison made for multiple takes to get any one song done and finished. When all was said and done, all four band members had a part in the creation of the song, one that landed at Number 1 on the pop chart in August 1968.

[metrolyrics artist="The Doors" song="Hello, I Love You"]

There’s a lot more ammo where this came from. Check out more songs that were “#1 with a Bullet” here…