It's Not Unusual

It's Not Unusual (Glee Cast Version) — Tom Jones via McKinley High

Glee and the Art of the Cover Economy

In the fall of 2011, the television series Glee was entering its third season on Fox, still one of the more culturally visible programs on American network television. The show's premise, a high school show choir navigating teenage social dynamics while performing pop and rock classics, had proven to be an extraordinarily effective vehicle for placing contemporary audiences in contact with a vast catalogue of pre-existing songs. Each episode functioned partly as a music discovery mechanism, and the recordings the cast made of those songs regularly crossed over onto the Billboard Hot 100 through digital download sales.

The choice of It's Not Unusual for a Glee episode was particularly interesting given the song's original context. Tom Jones had first recorded the track in 1964, with Les Reed and Gordon Mills credited as composers and Reed as arranger and producer. It reached number 1 in the United Kingdom and climbed to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States in early 1965, establishing Jones as a major international pop star before he had fully crystallized his identity as the extravagant Las Vegas-style entertainer that later generations would associate with his name. The song carried a specific joie de vivre that remained appealing nearly five decades after its original release.

The Glee Recording and Its Chart Context

The Glee Cast version of It's Not Unusual appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 8, 2011, debuting and peaking at number 65. It spent a single week on the chart, a brief appearance that was nonetheless commercially meaningful in the context of a television tie-in. The show's fanbase, known as Gleeks, was highly organized around purchasing and downloading the cast recordings associated with each episode, which accounted for the reliable if often brief chart appearances that Glee recordings achieved throughout the series' run.

The episode in which the song appeared gave the show's writers an opportunity to use its particular energy for a specific dramatic purpose within the narrative, and the performance was staged accordingly. The cast's version leaned into the playful, almost comedic exuberance of the original, which was well-suited to the show's theatrical sensibility.

Tom Jones's Original and What Made It Special

To understand the Glee version, it helps to understand what made the original so durable. Tom Jones's recording was distinguished by its extraordinary orchestral arrangement and by the sheer physical power of Jones's baritone voice. The song's structure was deceptively simple, a breezy declaration of emotional availability built around an extremely hooky melodic line. The brass arrangement gave it punch and swagger. Jones delivered it with the confidence of a man who had no doubts about his own appeal, which was precisely the energy the song needed.

The Glee cast version preserved the song's core qualities while adapting it to the show's ensemble vocal style. The production was cleaner and more contemporary than the 1964 original, but the fundamental cheerfulness and musical directness remained intact. For younger viewers encountering the song for the first time through the episode, it functioned as an introduction to a classic; for older viewers, it offered the mild pleasure of hearing a familiar song reinterpreted by new voices.

Glee as a Chart Phenomenon

The Glee effect on the Hot 100 was genuinely unprecedented. The show placed dozens of cover recordings on the chart over its six-season run, creating a kind of parallel economy of classic songs that re-entered the commercial conversation weeks or months after airing. The phenomenon demonstrated the power of television as a music discovery and sales platform in the digital download era, where the gap between hearing a song and purchasing it had shrunk to seconds. Whatever the artistic merits of any individual recording, the Glee model was commercially ingenious and culturally influential.

The It's Not Unusual episode was one episode among many in this pattern, but it chose well: a song with genuine cross-generational appeal and a specific joie de vivre that translated naturally to a show about young people finding joy in performance. The music did what good cover choices always do: it made the show feel connected to something larger than itself.

A Song That Keeps Moving

Tom Jones's original has now outlasted the chart run of virtually every contemporary hit it competed with in 1965, and the Glee version contributed another small chapter to its ongoing life in popular culture. Streaming numbers continue to accumulate for both versions, with new listeners discovering the song through algorithm recommendations and playlist curation. The song's persistence is a function of its fundamental quality: a great melody, an irresistible groove, and a message so uncomplicated that it crosses every cultural boundary without effort. Press play on either version and feel what it means when a song knows exactly what it wants to be.

"It's Not Unusual" — Glee Cast's singular moment on the 2010s charts.