Letter Banks of the Hot 100 by Tortoise

Champion(s):

BringMoreLegos
Never rank; always tier. (I'm LowdenB in LL.)

NathanL
All my thoughts have been replaced with Hamilton quotes.

Runner(s)-Up:

Quiz Description

Inspired by NathanL's recent quizzes based on wordplay of popular song titles. A letter bank is a sort of wordplay involving two or more words or phrases. The shortest word, called the "bank," has no repeated letters, and each of the longer words uses all of the letters of the bank, with some repetitions, and no other letters. For example, the phrase IN THE CARDS is a bank for HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. In this quiz, you will see 12 letter banks for the titles of songs that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. For example, LAMB would be a letter bank for "La Bamba" by Los Lobos (whose name happens to bank down to SLOB, but in this quiz, only the titles are used). For each bank, please provide the ORIGINAL TITLE. As a hint, the songs are clued in chronological order of when they first reached number one, ranging from 1961 to 2008. If a song title was listed in the top spot multiple times, either in the same release or in releases by different artists, the first appearance of that song title is used for the purposes of sorting. Spelling counts insofar as the wordplay is still valid. If a misspelled version of the correct song title would still bank down to the given clue, it will be counted as correct. However, if either the original title or your misspelled version does not properly bank down the the given clue, it will be incorrect. So, for example, if the clue were DEPARTINGS and the intended answer was "Gangsta's Paradise," then "Gangster's Paradise" would be an acceptable answer as it also fits the wordplay, but "The Gangsta's Paradise" would not be acceptable, as DEPARTINGS does not contain the letter H, and if there were a hypothetical #1 hit titled "Pasta Dressin'" then "Pasta Dressing" would not be acceptable, as the original title lacks a G. All words in the title count towards the letter bank wordplay, including leading articles. None of the song titles used in this quiz have parenthetical subtitles. Furthermore, every song title will be AT LEAST three letters longer than the bank used in the clue. So, for example, the bank CARMEN would not be used to clue "Macarena," which is only two letters longer than its bank. Spaces and punctuation are ignored for the purposes of wordplay, and no numbers or other non-alphabetic symbols that might get pronounced appear in any of the titles. Best of luck!