784 / 784 ARTICLES
LOGIC · 2017
It looks like a song about wanting to die, but it is built as a phone call that turns around halfway through: a song meant to keep someone a…
THE SMASHING PUMPKINS · 1996
CHICAGO, USA
The most beloved song The Smashing Pumpkins ever recorded was nearly thrown off the album — Billy Corgan reportedly wrote the entire lyric o…
J. COLE · 2018
Heard as a diss track aimed at Lil Pump and the SoundCloud generation, "1985" is really a worried older brother's letter: Cole tells young r…
BRUNO MARS · 2016
LAS VEGAS, USA
"24K Magic" sounds like a brag about wealth, but it is really an invitation: Bruno Mars rebuilt the Las Vegas showroom of his childhood as a…
TOMMY TUTONE · 1981
A power-pop song built around a fictional girl's phone number scrawled on a bathroom wall became so catchy that it caused real-world chaos f…
DOLLY PARTON · 1980
Behind the bounciest wake-up song in pop history sits a protest song about office workers who get underpaid, overlooked and patronised, and …
TRAVIS SCOTT · 2015
BEVERLY HILLS, USA
"90210" sounds like a woozy ode to Beverly Hills luxury, but it is really a two-part confession about what Los Angeles does to people who ar…
TYLER, THE CREATOR · 2017
It sounds like a sunny, roller-rink love song, but "911 / Mr. Lonely" is Tyler, the Creator admitting that the loudest, funniest guy in the …
NENA · 1983
WEST BERLIN, GERMANY
A bouncy, candy-coloured pop hit that is secretly a chilling Cold War parable — ninety-nine harmless balloons drift over a militarised borde…
JAY-Z · 2003
NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE, USA
The most quoted punchline in Jay-Z's catalogue is not about a woman at all, and the verse underneath it is such a precise account of a roads…
THE BEATLES · 1967
LONDON, UK
The closing track of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is less a song than a controlled collision of two pop fragments, a forty-piece or…
21 SAVAGE · 2018
On the surface "a lot" sounds like a rapper showing off how much he has, but underneath it is a ledger of what success cost him: dead friend…
THE JACKSON 5 · 1970
DETROIT, USA
"ABC" sounds like a sweet, sugary nursery rhyme about a boy teaching a girl about love, but it's really a precision-engineered hit built by …
NIRVANA · 1989
A pop song hiding inside a noise record, "About a Girl" was Kurt Cobain's quiet confession that he loved The Beatles as much as Black Flag. …
ROBERT PALMER · 1986
"Addicted to Love" sounds like a strutting celebration of desire, but it is really a deadpan diagnosis: a man describing infatuation as a cl…
HARRY STYLES · 2019
"Adore You" sounds like a breezy, sunlit crush song, but it is really about the giddy, slightly reckless vow of someone who would give every…
TOTO · 1982
The most famous song about Africa was written by a Los Angeles session musician who had never set foot on the continent. It is really a song…
STARLAND VOCAL BAND · 1976
GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, D.C., USA
The sunniest, most wholesome-sounding harmony record of America's Bicentennial summer is, top to bottom, a song about having sex in the midd…
MARVIN GAYE & TAMMI TERRELL · 1967
The most joyful duet in Motown history was written by two songwriters on the outside looking in, sung by two voices that were reportedly not…
BILL WITHERS · 1971
SLAB FORK, USA
— In 1971, a 32-year-old factory worker named Bill Withers, still assembling toilet seats for Boeing 747s, walked into a Los Angeles studio …
FATS DOMINO · 1955
NEW ORLEANS, USA
Behind the sunniest piano triplets in 1950s America sits a song about being betrayed and refusing to beg — a man watching love walk out and …
PEARL JAM · 1991
SEATTLE, USA
Eddie Vedder wrote "Alive" as a curse, not an anthem: a half-autobiographical story about a boy who discovers his father was never his fathe…
JIMI HENDRIX · 1968
A Bob Dylan parable, written in a Woodstock farmhouse during a motorcycle-accident convalescence, was transmuted six months later in a Londo…
JANET JACKSON · 2001
Beneath its glittering disco shimmer, "All for You" is the sound of Janet Jackson stepping out of a painful divorce and into her own pleasur…
BILLY JOEL · 1982
ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA, USA
"Allentown" is really about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — Billy Joel borrowed the neighboring town's name because it sang better — and beneath i…
GILBERT O'SULLIVAN · 1972
Behind one of the breeziest melodies of the 1970s hides a song about being jilted at the altar, contemplating suicide, losing both parents, …
KENDRICK LAMAR · 2015
COMPTON, USA
A gospel-grade promise wrapped in West Coast jazz: a young rapper from Compton tells a generation in the middle of an uprising that, somehow…
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS · 1978
"Alternative Ulster" isn't a call to pick a side in Northern Ireland's Troubles — it's a furious refusal to pick either. Written by Belfast …
MARIAH CAREY · 1996
It sounds like the happiest breakup song ever written, and that is exactly the trick — "Always Be My Baby" is about a relationship that has …
BON JOVI · 1994
A power ballad that was nearly discarded before becoming one of the best-selling singles of the 1990s, "Always" captures the moment when Bon…
WILLIE NELSON · 1982
It sounds like the most tender apology in country music, but "Always on My Mind" is really a confession of failure — a man admitting he thou…
TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS · 1976
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA
"American Girl" sounds like a triumphant anthem of freedom, but listen closely and it is a portrait of restless longing — a young woman stan…
GREEN DAY · 2004
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, USA
"American Idiot" is not an attack on America — it's an attack on television. Billie Joe Armstrong reportedly wrote it in a flash of irritati…
DON MCLEAN · 1971
CLEAR LAKE, IOWA, USA
A folk-rock epic stretching past eight and a half minutes, "American Pie" is at once a private elegy for the rock-and-roll dead and a public…
SEX PISTOLS · 1976
LONDON, UK
It sounds like a bomb going off, but "Anarchy in the U.K." is less a political manifesto than a piece of gleeful theatre — a young singer pl…
SEX PISTOLS · 1976
LONDON, UK
— In late 1976, four young men from London detonated a two-and-a-half-minute single that was less a song than a controlled demolition of Bri…
SARAH MCLACHLAN · 1998
"Angel" is not a love song, a lullaby, or a hymn — it's Sarah McLachlan's empathetic portrait of a touring musician who died of a heroin ove…
THE ROLLING STONES · 1973
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
The Stones' most tender ballad was reportedly written by Keith Richards on an acoustic guitar while he was drying out in a Swiss clinic, and…
PINK FLOYD · 1979
A disco-tempo protest song wrapped inside a triple-suite concept album, "Another Brick in the Wall" turned a children's choir into a batteri…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2022
The biggest pop song of 2022 is not a love song, a revenge song, or a victory lap — it is a woman with the largest audience on earth calmly …
DAFT PUNK · 1997
PARIS, FRANCE
"Around the World" has only one line of lyric, repeated for seven minutes, and that is not laziness but the whole point: Daft Punk built a d…
HARRY STYLES · 2022
Behind the bright, bouncing synths of the biggest song of 2022 sits a portrait of someone mid-transformation, lonely and a little lost, admi…
JOE DASSIN · 1969
AVENUE DES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES, PARIS, FRANCE
The most Parisian song ever recorded was written by two Englishmen about a grey road in south London, and was sung by a New Yorker whose fam…
OUTKAST · 2000
ATLANTA, USA
"B.O.B." stands for "Bombs Over Baghdad", but it isn't really a war song. It's a manifesto about hitting the listener with music so fast, lo…
CONSUELO VELÁZQUEZ · 1940
The world's most famous plea for a kiss was written by a teenage Mexican pianist who, by her own account, had never been kissed at all. It i…
SIR MIX-A-LOT · 1992
Behind the jokes and the giant novelty prop, "Baby Got Back" is a pointed protest against the narrow, rail-thin beauty standard that early-1…
BRITNEY SPEARS · 1998
A seventeen-year-old from Kentwood, Louisiana steps into a Stockholm studio and walks out with the song that ends the twentieth century and …
THE RUTS · 1979
"Babylon's Burning" isn't just a punk anthem about riots — it's a warning siren from a band of white West London punks who learned the word …
AC/DC · 1980
A funeral disguised as a celebration, "Back in Black" is the sound of a band refusing to bury itself alongside its dead singer. Released jus…
PRETENDERS · 1982
It sounds like a bittersweet love song about a photograph, and it began as one — about Ray Davies of the Kinks. Then the Pretenders' guitari…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2014
"Bad Blood" is not a breakup song at all. It is about a female friendship that curdled into professional sabotage, and it became famous most…
BILLIE EILISH · 2019
HIGHLAND PARK, LOS ANGELES, USA
"Bad Guy" is not a villain's anthem at all. It is a teenager laughing at a boy who performs toughness, then calmly revealing that the real m…
ED SHEERAN · 2021
"Bad Habits" is a song about relapse dressed up as the best night of your life — a euphoric dance track in which the euphoria is the problem…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Bad" sounds like a swaggering boast, but it was reportedly inspired by the true story of a teenager from a rough neighbourhood who went off…
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL · 1969
"Bad Moon Rising" is a cheerful-sounding, two-and-a-bit-minute warning that the world is about to come apart. John Fogerty wrapped a vision …
LADY GAGA · 2009
A glittering, gothic dance-pop manifesto disguised as a love song, "Bad Romance" arrived at the end of the 2000s as both the culmination of …
ENRIQUE IGLESIAS · 2014
MADRID, SPAIN
A summer anthem that bridged Madrid, Miami, and Havana, "Bailando" became one of the most-streamed Spanish-language songs of the decade. Its…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1982
LOS ANGELES, USA
Beneath the screaming guitar and the switchblade swagger, "Beat It" is an anti-violence anthem in disguise — a song that tells young men the…
U2 · 2000
DUBLIN, IRELAND
The most euphoric U2 song of the century is sung by a man who has lost everything — the joy is not in spite of the wreckage but because of i…
IMAGINE DRAGONS · 2017
"Believer" sounds like a stadium workout anthem, but it is really a thank-you letter to suffering. Dan Reynolds wrote it after years of chro…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1972
"Ben" is a tender ballad about loyal, unconditional friendship — but the friend in question is a rat. It was the theme song to a horror film…
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. · 1995
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA
The smoothest, most charming song on one of rap's darkest albums is also its biggest lie of omission — a 22-year-old former crack dealer fro…
JONI MITCHELL · 1970
HONOLULU, USA
A bouncy little tune that became one of pop's first environmental anthems, born when Joni Mitchell opened a hotel curtain in Honolulu, saw a…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1982
"Billie Jean" is the story of a man being accused of fathering a child he insists isn't his — a paranoid, defensive groove built on Michael …
THE VERVE · 1997
Behind its glorious swirl of strings, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is a song about being trapped in a life of work, money and routine that grinds…
THE VERVE · 1997
HOXTON STREET, LONDON, UK
"Bittersweet Symphony" is a song about being trapped — a man walking a fixed path through a world that bills him for every step — and in the…
LED ZEPPELIN · 1971
HEADLEY, HAMPSHIRE, UK
The swaggering riff that opens Led Zeppelin's fourth album was engineered on purpose to be impossible to dance to, and it is named after an …
SOUNDGARDEN · 1994
SEATTLE, USA
The most famous song Soundgarden ever recorded began with a misheard phrase on a news broadcast, took Chris Cornell reportedly about fifteen…
SANTANA · 1970
The song the world hears as the ultimate Latin-rock anthem was written two years earlier by a shy English blues guitarist, Peter Green of Fl…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
A swaggering rock-pop hybrid that arrived as the lead single from Dangerous, "Black or White" fused Slash's guitar pyrotechnics with a dance…
PEARL JAM · 1991
SEATTLE, USA
"Black" is a first-love wound set to music — the sound of a man realising that the woman who shaped him is going to go on and build a beauti…
THE BEATLES · 1968
On the surface it is a gentle folk song about a bird learning to fly, but Paul McCartney has said he wrote "Blackbird" with the American civ…
THE JACKSONS · 1978
A man who can't stop dancing decides his uncontrollable feet aren't his fault — he pins the whole thing on the irresistible power of "the bo…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2014
A masterclass in self-aware celebrity, "Blank Space" weaponized tabloid mythology by becoming the very monster the press had been drawing fo…
MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND · 1976
ASBURY PARK, NEW JERSEY, USA
It is not a drug anthem and nobody is singing about feminine hygiene products — "Blinded by the Light" is a young Bruce Springsteen's verbos…
THE WEEKND · 2019
LAS VEGAS, USA
Behind the bright, joyful synth riff is a song about a man alone, drunk and speeding through a city at night because he can't stand being wi…
RAMONES · 1976
In the summer of 1976, four men in leather jackets and ripped jeans walked into a New York studio and recorded a song so violently simple it…
BOB DYLAN · 1963
A twenty-one-year-old folk singer from Minnesota wrote a song in roughly ten minutes inside a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, and within mont…
EIFFEL 65 · 1999
The most famous part of the song was never meant to be words at all — it was a placeholder scat sung to hold the melody until real lyrics ar…
ROBIN THICKE · 2013
"Blurred Lines" was the most inescapable party record of 2013, but its real story is about two fights it lost: one in the court of public op…
CARDI B · 2017
"Bodak Yellow" sounds like a flex about red-soled shoes and money, but at its core it is a receipt: a former Bronx strip-club dancer announc…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"Bodies" isn't a political anthem about abortion — it's a horrified, first-person scream inspired by a real fan named Pauline, a deeply trou…
THE DANDY WARHOLS · 2000
PORTLAND, OREGON, USA
It sounds like a love song about two cool people finding each other, but "Bohemian Like You" is a deadpan joke at the expense of both of the…
QUEEN · 1975
: A six-minute mock-opera that violated every rule of mid-1970s radio programming and somehow became one of the most beloved singles in popu…
EARTH WIND & FIRE · 1979
Beneath its glittering horns and party-starting strings, "Boogie Wonderland" is a song about people who go dancing because they are hurting,…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1984
UNITED STATES, USA
: Bruce Springsteen's 1984 anthem is one of the most misread songs in American popular music — a bleak portrait of a Vietnam veteran abandon…
LADY GAGA · 2011
The biggest self-acceptance anthem of the 2010s did not begin with Lady Gaga at all — it borrows its title and its soul from a 1970s disco r…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1975
ASBURY PARK, NEW JERSEY, USA
In the summer of 1975, a 25-year-old from Freehold, New Jersey gambled his entire career on a single song — a Wall of Sound epic about two k…
GREEN DAY · 2004
A mid-tempo dirge that became the unofficial soundtrack to post-9/11 American adolescence, Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" turned p…
BTS · 2019
On the surface it is a candy-coloured crush song, but "Boy With Luv" is really BTS admitting that the swaggering, chest-out version of thems…
BLUR · 1994
MAGALUF, MALLORCA, SPAIN
The song everybody half-remembers as "Boys & Girls" is really Blur's "Girls & Boys," and it isn't a celebration of a party — it's a field re…
LOOKING GLASS · 1972
Beneath its sunny soft-rock shimmer, "Brandy" is a quietly devastating story about a barmaid who loses the only man she ever loved — not to …
TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS · 1976
"Breakdown" is not a song about a nervous collapse. It is a quiet, almost unbearably patient plea for honesty at the end of a relationship, …
NEIL SEDAKA · 1962
BRILL BUILDING, NEW YORK CITY, USA
One of pop's happiest-sounding records is actually a man begging someone not to leave him — and the nonsense syllables everyone remembers we…
PINK FLOYD · 1973
LONDON, UK
It sounds like the most relaxing song ever recorded, but "Breathe" is a warning: a set of instructions handed to someone at the start of lif…
2PAC · 1991
2Pac's first solo single isn't a party record or a boast. It's a newspaper tragedy turned into a short film for the ears: the story of a 12-…
PINK · 2011
A power ballad written for the animated film Happy Feet Two, "Bridge of Light" arrived in late 2011 as a quieter cousin to Pink's blockbuste…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1970
The most comforting song in the American songbook was written by a man who was quietly falling out with his best friend, and handed to that …
THE ROLLING STONES · 1971
MUSCLE SHOALS, ALABAMA, USA
Beneath one of the most joyous riffs in rock history sits one of its darkest lyrics — a song about slavery, sexual exploitation, and forbidd…
BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · 1983
"Buffalo Soldier" sounds like a sunny singalong, but it is a quiet history lesson about Black American cavalrymen who were taken from Africa…
BOB MARLEY · 1983
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
The sunniest-sounding song in Bob Marley's catalogue is about a Black man taken out of Africa, handed a US Army uniform, and sent west to de…
TALKING HEADS · 1983
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The title was not David Byrne's idea and has nothing to do with arson — drummer Chris Frantz brought it back from a Parliament-Funkadelic gi…
BTS · 2021
"Butter" sounds like a frothy summer flirt song, but underneath it is a victory lap: seven men from a small Seoul agency, written off for ye…
THE MAMAS & THE PAPAS · 1966
NEW YORK CITY, USA
It sounds like a sunny postcard from the West Coast, but "California Dreamin'" was actually written in a freezing New York winter by a homes…
2PAC FT. DR. DRE · 1995
LOS ANGELES, USA
On the surface it is the ultimate West Coast party anthem, but "California Love" was really a homecoming record: the first thing Tupac Shaku…
2PAC FT. DR. DRE · 1995
CALIFORNIA, USA
The ultimate West Coast anthem was recorded weeks after 2Pac walked out of a New York prison cell, by a rapper who was born in New York and …
DEAD KENNEDYS · 1979
"California Über Alles" isn't an attack on right-wing fascism at all — it's a punk satire aimed squarely at a liberal Democrat, Governor Jer…
THE JACKSONS · 1980
It sounds like a wall-shaking dancefloor anthem, but "Can You Feel It" is really a near-spiritual plea for universal brotherhood — a Jackson…
THE WEEKND · 2015
Behind the bounciest, most Michael Jackson-flavoured pop hit of 2015 is a love song addressed to a drug, and that drug is widely understood …
KYLIE MINOGUE · 2001
Beneath the white hooded jumpsuit and the hypnotic la-la-la hook, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is a song about obsession as a kind of beau…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2020
"Cardigan" is not a cosy love song about a sweater at all. It is a grown woman looking back on the teenage boy who broke her heart, and admi…
NATALIE MERCHANT · 1995
NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Carnival" sounds like a dreamy ode to the bright lights of New York, but it is really a confession: a woman walks the city as a detached sp…
GRATEFUL DEAD · 1970
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA
The Grateful Dead's most notorious singalong is not a celebration of cocaine but a horror story about it — a warning dressed in a bouncy tun…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1970
The bouncy, hand-slapped party anthem about a faithless lover is almost certainly not about a woman at all. Paul Simon has long hinted that …
OASIS · 1995
Closing out (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, "Champagne Supernova" is the seven-and-a-half-minute hangover at the end of Britpop's most fa…
SIA · 2014
"Chandelier" sounds like the ultimate party anthem, but it's actually a harrowing confession about alcoholism and addiction — Sia's own. The…
ERIC CLAPTON · 1996
A velvet-gloved country-soul ballad written by Nashville songwriters and delivered by the most famous blues guitarist on Earth, "Change the …
2PAC · 1998
The most respectable song in 2Pac's catalogue, the one played in classrooms and reportedly on a Vatican playlist, is a shelved 1992 demo he …
DAVID BOWIE · 1972
LONDON, UK
The song now treated as David Bowie's personal manifesto was, by his own reported account, closer to a throwaway cabaret pastiche, and it fl…
ADELE · 2008
OXFORD STREET, LONDON, UK
"Chasing Pavements" was reportedly born on a London street at dawn, minutes after a teenage Adele walked out of a bar where she had just con…
JIMMY BUFFETT · 1978
CANE GARDEN BAY, TORTOLA, BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
The most famous song ever written about a hamburger is not a celebration of paradise at all — it's the story of a man stranded in one, half-…
JOÃO GILBERTO · 1959
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
On the surface it is a lover begging his sadness to go and fetch back the woman who left him, but the real story is that two minutes of whis…
SYSTEM OF A DOWN · 2001
Behind the frantic riffs and the takeaway-menu title is a song originally called "Suicide", a meditation on how we judge the way people die …
THE WAITRESSES · 1981
"Christmas Wrapping" is an anti-Christmas song that turns into one of the most romantic holiday records ever made: a burned-out woman tries …
NICKI MINAJ · 2018
"Chun-Li" is Nicki Minaj's answer to everyone who had cast her as the villain of hip-hop: instead of arguing back, she took the role, borrow…
COLDPLAY · 2002
LIVERPOOL, UK
"Clocks" is not a love song about running out of time so much as a panic attack set to a piano arpeggio, written in roughly a quarter of an …
SEMISONIC · 1998
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
Everyone thinks it's a song about getting kicked out of a bar at last call — but Semisonic's frontman wrote it about being born. It's a lull…
ERIC CLAPTON · 1977
A swaggering, deceptively simple blues-rock riff that has been mistaken for a celebration of drug culture for nearly half a century. Origina…
NIRVANA · 1991
The most welcoming song in the Nirvana catalogue is really a song about how impossible it is to be welcomed — an invitation that keeps contr…
DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS · 1982
BIRMINGHAM, UK
Beneath the most joyful sing-along of the early '80s sits something far more frank: it's a song about two working-class teenagers, half-suff…
THE BEATLES · 1969
A swampy, slurred incantation that opens the last album The Beatles ever recorded together, "Come Together" began life as a campaign jingle …
PINK FLOYD · 1979
A six-minute meditation on dissociation disguised as a stadium rock anthem, "Comfortably Numb" arrived in late 1979 as the emotional pivot o…
CLAUDE FRANÇOIS · 1967
Long before it became "My Way," the world's favourite anthem of proud self-determination, this melody carried the exact opposite story: a qu…
PULP · 1995
LONDON, UK
"Common People" is not a celebration of ordinary life but a furious rebuke of "class tourism": a wealthy art student who wants to play at be…
THE CLASH · 1977
"Complete Control" is The Clash biting the hand that fed them — a furious, joyous protest song aimed directly at their own record label, CBS…
K.D. LANG · 1992
The song that made k.d. lang a global star was born out of an unrequited love for a married woman who did not love her back, and it was writ…
BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · 1980
Behind the bounciest dance-floor groove Bob Marley ever cut sits a stern sermon: stop letting other people define you, stop judging, and ask…
BOB MARLEY · 1980
It plays like the happiest song at every beach bar on earth, but "Could You Be Loved" is a confrontation — a dying man asking whether you ha…
ONEREPUBLIC · 2013
Behind the stomping banjo-pop and the singalong chorus, "Counting Stars" is a song about money anxiety: a hit songwriter lying awake over bi…
DAVE MATTHEWS BAND · 1996
The dreamy wedding-dance staple is actually, by Dave Matthews's own admission, a song sung from the perspective of a voyeur — a confession o…
LINKIN PARK · 2000
The song the internet turned into its loudest joke about teenage angst is actually Chester Bennington's clear-eyed account of addiction and …
GNARLS BARKLEY · 2006
"Crazy" sounds like a breezy soul strut, but it is really a song about the moment you realise that the "sane" world might be the one that ha…
BEYONCÉ · 2003
The most confident-sounding record of the decade began as a throwaway remark about a bad outfit and worse hair, and it is not a seduction an…
OZZY OSBOURNE · 1980
Behind the most famous stadium riff in rock sits a nervous Cold War protest song, written by a fired singer and his new band, about a world …
RADIOHEAD · 1992
CHIPPING NORTON, UK
The song that made Radiohead famous was recorded almost by accident — a throwaway the band had been using to warm up, which the producers ta…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2019
It sounds like the most euphoric summer song Taylor Swift ever made, but it is really about the terror of loving someone in secret and the h…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1984
A reluctantly written pop song that became the biggest hit of Bruce Springsteen's career, "Dancing in the Dark" is a study in how exhaustion…
THE JACKSON 5 · 1974
On the surface "Dancing Machine" is a sleek love letter to a woman who moves like she's got circuits inside her — but it's really the sound …
ABBA · 1976
ABBA's "Dancing Queen" (1976) sounds like pure euphoria, but underneath the shimmer lies a quietly melancholic portrait of a young woman's f…
ROGER MILLER · 1964
Behind the hiccuping nonsense syllables and the grin, "Dang Me" is a confession from a man who knows he is a bad husband and father and deci…
BLACKPINK · 2018
The title isn't nonsense. It is the sound of gunfire, and the song is a two-and-a-half-minute warning shot fired at the idea that a pretty g…
2PAC · 1995
The most famous mother's-day song in hip-hop history is not a greeting card. It is a confession written by a man in a prison cell to a mothe…
PIXIES · 1989
"Debaser" is a two-and-a-half-minute love letter to a 1929 surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, in which a razor slices an eyeball. Black Fran…
THE FOUR SEASONS · 1975
The most euphoric party record of 1976 started life as a song about the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 — and the ecstatic lead vocal everyone…
IMAGINE DRAGONS · 2012
"Demons" sounds like a dark love song, but at its heart it is a confession from a man who believes his inner darkness could hurt the people …
LUIS FONSI FT. DADDY YANKEE · 2017
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
En enero de 2017, una canción grabada en un estudio modesto de San Juan rompió todos los récords de la industria musical global. "Despacito"…
LUIS FONSI FT. DADDY YANKEE · 2017
LA PERLA, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
The biggest party song of the 2010s is, at heart, a plea for patience: a seduction that refuses to rush, written by a balladeer who woke up …
LUIS FONSI FT. DADDY YANKEE · 2017
LA PERLA, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
The biggest song on the planet in 2017 is not a party anthem at all — it is a patient, almost courtly argument for slowing down, written by …
EAGLES · 1973
: "Desperado" is a piano ballad masquerading as a cowboy song — a meditation on emotional isolation written by two young Californians who ba…
KISS · 1976
DETROIT, MICHIGAN, USA
It sounds like the ultimate party anthem, but "Detroit Rock City" is actually a story about a fan who dies in a head-on car crash on the way…
LINDA RONSTADT · 1967
"Different Drum" sounds like a heartbreak song, but it is really a polite, almost cheerful refusal to be tied down, written by a Monkee and …
AC/DC · 1976
It sounds like a tough-guy anthem, but "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" is really a cartoon joke: Bon Scott borrowed the title from a Saturday-…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1988
"Dirty Diana" is Michael Jackson's snarling, guitar-soaked confession about the predatory groupie culture that surrounded him at the height …
ARCTIC MONKEYS · 2013
It sounds like the most confident seduction in modern rock, but the question in the title is not aimed at the woman at all. Alex Turner is i…
PETER FRAMPTON · 1976
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
The most famous question in 1970s rock is not a philosophical challenge at all — by most accounts it started as a hungover joke between exha…
OASIS · 1995
A song Noel Gallagher admits was half nonsense, built around a name he couldn't think of a rhyme for, somehow became Britain's go-to hymn fo…
DUA LIPA · 2019
"Don't Start Now" is not really a breakup song. It is a song about the moment after the breakup, when the person who walked away looks back …
SIMPLE MINDS · 1985
The defining anthem of 1980s teen cinema was written by outsiders, turned down by several stars, and recorded by a Glasgow band who reported…
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA · 1979
The band famous for orchestras made its biggest American hit without a single string player, and the word everyone shouts in the chorus was …
GUNS N' ROSES · 1991
A power ballad written years before it was released, "Don't Cry" arrived as the emotional centerpiece of Guns N' Roses' twin 1991 epics, Use…
CROWDED HOUSE · 1986
It is usually filed as a wistful breakup ballad, but "Don't Dream It's Over" is really a stubborn refusal to give up, written by a broke and…
BLUE ÖYSTER CULT · 1976
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK, USA
It sounds like a creepy ode to death, but it was written by a man staring down his own mortality as a love song about devotion outlasting th…
OASIS · 1995
MANCHESTER, UK
A piano figure borrowed from Lennon, a chorus built for a stadium, and a sentiment lifted from a half-remembered Kerouac line: this is the s…
NO DOUBT · 1996
ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA, USA
"Don't Speak" sounds like a generic breakup ballad, but it is really a painfully specific song about Gwen Stefani being dumped by her own ba…
JOURNEY · 1981
DETROIT, MICHIGAN, USA
The most-sung chorus in American rock began as something a worried father said down a payphone line to his broke, failing son in Los Angeles…
QUEEN · 1978
: A breathless three-and-a-half-minute eruption of piano, falsetto, and cosmic metaphor, Queen's 1978 single was initially dismissed as fill…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1979
A trembling, almost-whispered invocation explodes into a four-on-the-floor groove that effectively announces Michael Jackson's reinvention a…
THE HUMAN LEAGUE · 1981
SHEFFIELD, UK
It sounds like a lovers' duet, but it's actually a courtroom — two people giving irreconcilable testimony about the same breakup, with a man…
DOLLY PARTON · 1970
DOVER, TENNESSEE, USA
It sounds like a waiting-for-my-love ballad, but "Down From Dover" is a young unmarried woman's account of being cast out by her family, wor…
MEN AT WORK · 1981
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
The song the whole world treats as Australia's unofficial national anthem is actually a sly protest about Australia losing its soul — a warn…
MÖTLEY CRÜE · 1989
"Dr. Feelgood" sounds like a party anthem, but it is a cold, clear-eyed portrait of a street-level drug dealer, written and recorded by a ba…
GARY WRIGHT · 1975
It sounds like a soft-focus seduction or a drug trip, but "Dream Weaver" is a prayer — Gary Wright built it around a phrase he found in the …
FLEETWOOD MAC · 1977
SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA, USA
"Dreams" is Stevie Nicks' eerily calm goodbye letter to Lindsey Buckingham, written in about ten minutes while the band was falling apart in…
DOBIE GRAY · 1973
"Drift Away" sounds like a lazy, feel-good radio song, but it is really a confession from someone who is worn down and near the edge, and wh…
OLIVIA RODRIGO · 2021
On the surface it is a teenage breakup ballad, but "drivers license" is really about a milestone turning sour: the freedom of finally being …
KENDRICK LAMAR · 2017
"DUCKWORTH." is a true story about a robbery that never happened. Years before Kendrick Lamar became famous, the man who would later sign hi…
BTS · 2020
"Dynamite" sounds like a carefree disco party, but it was built as an emergency dose of joy for a world stuck indoors in 2020. It was co-wri…
TYLER, THE CREATOR · 2019
"EARFQUAKE" sounds like a sugary radio love song, but it is really a panicked plea from someone who knows he is losing the person he loves a…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1995
A six-and-a-half-minute operatic lament that became Michael Jackson's biggest-selling single in the United Kingdom, "Earth Song" is less a p…
THE BEATLES · 1966
LIVERPOOL, UK
The most famous song The Beatles ever wrote about loneliness contains no Beatles playing instruments at all — just a double string quartet s…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"EMI" is the Sex Pistols' gleeful revenge song against the record label that signed them, panicked, and paid them to go away — making it pos…
JAY-Z FT. ALICIA KEYS · 2009
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The ultimate New York anthem was born out of homesickness in London, built on a beat by a British producer, and it is as much a warning abou…
JAY-Z FT. ALICIA KEYS · 2009
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The definitive New York anthem of the twenty-first century was not written in New York. It was written by two homesick Brooklyn songwriters …
METALLICA · 1991
A lullaby turned inside out, "Enter Sandman" was the moment Metallica stopped belonging to the underground and started belonging to everyone…
RUPERT HOLMES · 1979
The breeziest-sounding hit of 1979 is actually a story about two bored partners who each try to cheat on the other through a newspaper perso…
SABRINA CARPENTER · 2024
"Espresso" is not really a love song at all. It is a playful, deliberately silly anthem about knowing your own appeal so well that you becom…
PEARL JAM · 1991
SEATTLE, USA
The riff everyone air-guitars at weddings and sports bars is actually a portrait of a homeless man freezing on a Seattle sidewalk, unable to…
BUZZCOCKS · 1978
Punk's most perfect pop song was reportedly inspired by a line from the musical Guys and Dolls — and Pete Shelley wrote it about a man, slip…
THE POLICE · 1983
ORACABESSA, JAMAICA
The most requested first-dance song of the 1980s is not a love song at all — Sting wrote it in the wreckage of his first marriage as the voi…
THE POLICE · 1981
A glittering, almost embarrassingly earnest love song wedged into one of the most cerebral rock catalogs of the early eighties, "Every Littl…
BACKSTREET BOYS · 1997
A Halloween-coded dance-pop juggernaut engineered in Stockholm, sold first to Europe, and rerouted back to America as a declaration of conqu…
R.E.M. · 1992
The most emotionally direct song R.E.M. ever released was written mostly by the drummer, deliberately stripped of Michael Stipe's trademark …
TEARS FOR FEARS · 1985
BATH, UK
It sounds like a sun-bleached pop anthem you'd put your hands in the air to, but it's actually a cold-eyed warning about power, control, and…
ELLE KING · 2014
"Ex's & Oh's" sounds like a raucous bar-room brag about breaking hearts, but underneath the stomp it is a sly role reversal: a woman claimin…
SURVIVOR · 1982
The world's most famous workout anthem was really written about a champion who had gone soft, not a fighter at his peak. It was built, beat …
METALLICA · 1984
A landmark ballad nested inside a thrash metal record, "Fade to Black" was Metallica's first slow song and arguably the moment the genre lea…
THE POGUES FEAT. KIRSTY MACCOLL · 1987
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The most beloved Christmas song in Britain and Ireland is not really a Christmas song at all — it's a brutal, tender argument between two br…
JOURNEY · 1983
A power ballad written on a tour bus at three in the morning, "Faithfully" is one of the strangest love songs in arena-rock history: a medit…
RADIOHEAD · 1995
CANARY WHARF, LONDON, UK
Radiohead's most devastating ballad started life as something closer to a joke, and reportedly took shape after Thom Yorke watched Jeff Buck…
BABY KEEM · 2021
"family ties" sounds like a brag-off between two rappers, but at heart it is a family handoff: Kendrick Lamar stepping out of a long silence…
TRACY CHAPMAN · 1988
CLEVELAND, OHIO, USA
"Fast Car" sounds like a love song about young escape, but it is really a portrait of how poverty repeats itself across generations — and ho…
NINA SIMONE · 1965
TRYON, USA
"Feeling Good" was born not as a Nina Simone song but as a Broadway show tune written by two white Englishmen in 1964. Simone's 1965 recordi…
THE WHITE STRIPES · 2001
It sounds like pure sugar-rush infatuation, but "Fell in Love with a Girl" is really a one-minute-fifty confession of wanting someone who al…
ABBA · 1976
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
A song that began as a Swedish-language ballad about heartbreak in a Stockholm suburb somehow became a global meditation on revolution, regr…
PUBLIC ENEMY · 1989
BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN, USA
"Fight the Power" was written to order for a Spike Lee film about one scorching day on a Brooklyn block, yet it became something far larger:…
EUROPE · 1986
The most famous stadium fanfare of the 1980s is actually a sci-fi farewell song about humanity abandoning Earth for Venus, written around a …
UTADA HIKARU · 1999
"First Love" is not a song about falling in love. It is a teenager's eerily mature account of the moment after love ends, when you realise t…
COLDPLAY · 2005
A slow-building hymn for the moment after collapse, "Fix You" arrived in 2005 as the emotional centerpiece of Coldplay's third album, writte…
MODEST MOUSE · 2004
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, USA
The most optimistic indie-rock hit of the 2000s was written by a man who did not feel optimistic at all. Isaac Brock has described "Float On…
MILEY CYRUS · 2023
"Flowers" sounds like a breakup song, but it is really a reply. Miley Cyrus answered a famous ballad about a man's regret with a declaration…
FRANK SINATRA · 1964
The song everyone treats as a space-age anthem is not about space at all. It is a cabaret waltz from 1954 about a man so overwhelmed by love…
JOHNNY CASH · 1955
FOLSOM, USA
The most famous prison song in American music was written by a man who had never been inside a prison, sitting in a US Air Force barracks in…
BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD · 1966
SUNSET STRIP, WEST HOLLYWOOD, USA
The most famous "Vietnam protest song" was never about Vietnam at all. Stephen Stills wrote it in a matter of minutes about a few nights of …
CEELO GREEN · 2010
Behind the handclaps and the sunshine Motown groove, "Forget You" is the story of a broke man watching the woman he loves leave him for a ri…
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL · 1969
"Fortunate Son" is not an anti-soldier song and not even, strictly speaking, an anti-war song — it's a furious, two-minute class protest wri…
LYNYRD SKYNYRD · 1973
Released in 1973 on Lynyrd Skynyrd's debut album, "Free Bird" began as a tender goodbye and ended as a nine-minute guitar inferno. It is par…
GRATEFUL DEAD · 1970
It sounds like a cheerful bluegrass romp, but it's the confession of a man being hunted by the law, by two women, and by a devil who is less…
LIPPS INC. · 1979
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
Behind the most relentlessly cheerful disco riff ever pressed to vinyl is a restless homesick-in-reverse confession: a Minneapolis songwrite…
PSY · 2012
GANGNAM DISTRICT, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
The world danced to "Gangnam Style" as a goofy novelty hit, but at its core it is a sharp satire of status-obsessed wealth in Seoul's riches…
STAN GETZ & JOÃO GILBERTO · 1964
IPANEMA, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
The world remembers it as a breezy beach song, but "Garota de Ipanema" is really a quiet confession of loneliness: two middle-aged men in a …
DAFT PUNK · 2013
The biggest flirtation anthem of the 2010s is not really about a hookup at all — it is about surviving the night, written by two men whose e…
THE ROLLING STONES · 1969
A storm-warning of a song that opens The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed with one of the most ominous guitar figures in rock history. Released …
CYNDI LAUPER · 1983
It was written by a man as a cheeky boast about chasing girls, and Cyndi Lauper flipped it into the opposite: a declaration that women deser…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
It sounds like a seduction, but "Give In to Me" is really a cornered man's ultimatum — a snarling hard-rock plea about a lover who hides beh…
FLEETWOOD MAC · 1976
It sounds like a joyful, fist-pumping anthem of freedom, but "Go Your Own Way" is really Lindsey Buckingham's bitter, wounded goodbye to Ste…
DRAKE · 2018
"God's Plan" sounds like a victory lap, but at heart it is a quiet, almost anxious prayer from a man who feels surrounded by people hoping h…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"God Save the Queen" isn't really an attack on Elizabeth II the person — it's a furious distress flare fired by a generation of working-clas…
DRAKE · 2018
TORONTO, CANADA
A Toronto rapper turns a million-dollar music video budget into a gift to strangers in Miami, and somehow the song attached to it becomes th…
THE JAM · 1980
"Going Underground" is a furious refusal — a 25-year-old Paul Weller telling Cold War Britain that he'd rather vanish from public life than …
FLEETWOOD MAC · 1977
SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA, USA
The most gorgeous song on the best-selling break-up album of all time is a cocaine song in disguise, sung by a woman watching herself become…
OLIVIA RODRIGO · 2021
On the surface "good 4 u" is a sarcastic kiss-off to an ex who moved on too quickly, but at its core it is a song about the ugly, unglamorou…
MAC MILLER · 2020
"Good News" sounds like a gentle, sleepy shrug, but it is really a song about how tiring it is to keep acting fine for everyone else. Releas…
GREEN DAY · 1997
The song played at more graduations, weddings and funerals than almost any other American rock record is, underneath, a bitter breakup song …
CHIC · 1979
NEW YORK, USA
A glittering disco anthem recorded in Manhattan at the peak of the genre's commercial reign, "Good Times" sounds like a celebration but read…
THE BEACH BOYS · 1966
HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, USA
It sounds like a sun-drenched love song, but "Good Vibrations" is really Brian Wilson's attempt to bottle a feeling he learned from his moth…
WHITNEY HOUSTON · 1986
The most famous song about self-respect in pop history was not written as an anthem at all. It began life as the love theme for a Muhammad A…
BRUNO MARS · 2010
A devastatingly catchy ballad about asymmetric love, "Grenade" arrived in late 2010 as Bruno Mars's calling card — a song that hides operati…
JOSEÍTO FERNÁNDEZ · 1929
GUANTÁNAMO, CUBA
The world knows "Guantanamera" as a solemn hymn of Cuban pride set to the poetry of José Martí, but it began as a flirtatious country tune a…
ANTÔNIO CARLOS JOBIM · 1972
It sounds like a breezy list of random things, a stick, a stone, a road, but "Águas de Março" is the end-of-summer floods in Rio turned into…
LEONARD COHEN · 1984
"Hallelujah" is not a hymn of triumph but a song about failure, desire and broken faith, insisting that a cracked, exhausted, even bitter wo…
BEYONCÉ · 2008
"Halo" is not really a love song about being adored — it is a song about surrendering, written by two men for somebody else entirely, and re…
BILLIE EILISH · 2021
"Happier Than Ever" is a breakup song disguised as a lullaby. For two minutes it sounds like a sweet, forgiving farewell, and then it tears …
JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO · 1971
NEW YORK CITY, USA
It sounds like a cosy seasonal singalong, but "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" is really a protest song in a Christmas jumper: the last chapter of…
DOLLY PARTON · 1982
LA GRANGE, TEXAS, USA
It sounds like a gentle holiday hymn, but "Hard Candy Christmas" is really a song about unemployed sex workers walking out of a shuttered Te…
THE STROKES · 2001
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The song that made The Strokes famous is about the humiliation of not being able to say what you mean, and it was built to sound like a drum…
MAROON 5 · 2002
It sounds like a furious breakup song, but "Harder to Breathe" was reportedly born from Adam Levine's frustration with his own record label,…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
"Heal the World" sounds like a sweet children's lullaby, but Michael Jackson called it the song he was most proud of in his entire career — …
NIRVANA · 1993
CANNON FALLS, MINNESOTA, USA
The most famous love song in the Nirvana catalogue is really a song about being swallowed — a man describing devotion as a container he cann…
GLASS ANIMALS · 2020
Under its woozy, sun-dazed groove, "Heat Waves" is a song about grief and the slow realisation that you cannot save someone you love. It is …
PAUL MCCARTNEY & WINGS · 1973
"Helen Wheels" is not about a woman at all. It is a love song to Paul McCartney's battered Land Rover and to the long drive from his remote …
ADELE · 2015
A piano ballad disguised as a phone call, "Hello" arrived in October 2015 and shattered streaming records before its parent album, 25, even …
THE BEATLES · 1969
EWHURST, SURREY, UK
The sunniest song in the Beatles' catalogue is really a truant's song: George Harrison wrote it in Eric Clapton's Surrey garden on a spring …
DOLLY PARTON · 1977
It sounds like the happiest reunion in country-pop history, but it is really a song about relapse — a woman watching herself surrender, agai…
DAVID BOWIE · 1977
BERLIN, GERMANY
A six-minute anthem about two lovers kissing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, "Heroes" was never a hit upon release — it limped to number 2…
AVICII · 2013
The voice on the biggest folk-house record of the decade belongs to a Grammy-winning Appalachian bluegrass singer who was the uncredited sin…
JIMI HENDRIX · 1966
A slow-burning murder ballad delivered with a feline calm that hides a gathering storm, "Hey Joe" introduced Jimi Hendrix to British audienc…
THE BEATLES · 1968
: Written by Paul McCartney as a private consolation for John Lennon's young son Julian during his parents' divorce, "Hey Jude" became the l…
PLAIN WHITE T'S · 2006
NEW YORK CITY, USA
It is a real love letter to a real woman the singer barely knew — a track-and-field runner named Delilah DiCrescenzo — written about a long-…
OUTKAST · 2003
"Hey Ya!" sounds like the happiest party song of the century, but at its heart it is a blunt, almost bleak look at a relationship held toget…
RADIOHEAD · 1995
A reluctant ballad from a band already plotting its escape from the very sound that made it famous, "High and Dry" is Radiohead's most acces…
STEVIE WONDER · 1973
"Higher Ground" is a funk song about reincarnation and getting another chance at life. Stevie Wonder wrote it in a few hours, and a few mont…
STEVE WINWOOD · 1986
"Higher Love" sounds like the most confident record of 1986, but it was written by a man who had spent years alone in a Gloucestershire farm…
DEEP PURPLE · 1972
A song born backstage on a tour bus in 1971 became the opening salvo of one of hard rock's most consequential albums. "Highway Star" is less…
AC/DC · 1979
FREMANTLE, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, AUSTRALIA
The song that got AC/DC branded as satanists is actually a complaint about their job: the endless, grinding, sleep-deprived slog of touring.…
SHAKIRA FT. WYCLEF JEAN · 2006
BARRANQUILLA, COLOMBIA
Behind the party-anthem shine, "Hips Don't Lie" is a song about honesty: the idea that the body tells the truth when words fail. It is also …
SHAKIRA · 2006
BARRANQUILLA, COLOMBIA
The biggest global smash of Shakira's career was a song she reportedly did not want to record at all — a recycled instrumental, a borrowed s…
THE LUMINEERS · 2012
"Ho Hey" sounds like a wedding singalong, but it was born from years of loneliness, failed gigs and a hunger to belong. The famous shouts st…
38 SPECIAL · 1981
It sounds like a swaggering Southern rock anthem, but "Hold On Loosely" is really a piece of relationship advice: love dies when you grip it…
DEAD KENNEDYS · 1980
"Holiday in Cambodia" isn't really about Cambodia at all — it's a savage takedown of privileged, self-congratulating young Americans, sarcas…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
Despite its breezy travel-brochure title, "Holidays in the Sun" is a panic attack set to marching boots — Johnny Rotten staring at the Berli…
EAGLES · 1976
CALIFORNIA, USA
: "Hotel California" is the Eagles' six-and-a-half-minute parable about the seductive rot at the heart of the American Dream, dressed up as …
DRAKE · 2015
TORONTO, CANADA
A Toronto rapper turns a regretful late-night phone call into one of the decade's most parodied dance moves, and somehow also into a treatis…
BEE GEES · 1977
MIAMI, USA
A ballad written in a French château but recorded in Miami, "How Deep Is Your Love" became the quiet heart of the Saturday Night Fever pheno…
BLACKPINK · 2020
It sounds like a swaggering taunt aimed at an ex, but "How You Like That" is really a song about getting up off the floor: a comeback anthem…
NICKELBACK · 2001
The biggest rock radio hit of the early 2000s isn't a love song at all. It's a brutally honest confession from Chad Kroeger, written after a…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1983
LOS ANGELES, USA
"Human Nature" is Michael Jackson's tender confession that wanting things — the city, the night, the touch of another person — is not a sin …
THE HUMAN LEAGUE · 1986
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
It sounds like a tender apology from a man who strayed while away from home, but the real payload arrives in the spoken middle section, when…
THE KILLERS · 2008
A glittering, synth-soaked existential crisis disguised as a stadium anthem, "Human" asks one of pop music's most ridiculed and most endurin…
KENDRICK LAMAR · 2017
COMPTON, USA
A two-and-a-half-minute earthquake from Compton: a piano stab, a sneer at industry vanity, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning album's opening salv…
JOHNNY CASH · 2002
A 69-year-old Johnny Cash, his body failing and his wife of 35 years months from death, recorded a cover of a Nine Inch Nails industrial dir…
DEEP PURPLE · 1968
"Hush" was born as a gospel-flavoured Southern soul song by Joe South, and its real subject is an obsessive, almost spiritual summons from a…
DICK VAN DYKE · 1968
"Hushabye Mountain" sounds like a simple bedtime song from a family musical, but underneath it is a widower's lullaby: a father trying to fi…
COLDPLAY · 2015
WORLI VILLAGE, MUMBAI, INDIA
Chris Martin set out to write Coldplay's first proper late-night club banger, and the hook he came up with was reportedly about buying a rou…
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. · 1997
"Hypnotize" sounds like a carefree victory lap of champagne, speedboats and swagger, but it became a ghostly farewell: Biggie was murdered d…
ARCTIC MONKEYS · 2005
SHEFFIELD, UK
The song that made Arctic Monkeys the biggest band in Britain is built on a chat-up line so bad it's almost unusable — and that's the joke. …
ARCTIC MONKEYS · 2005
SHEFFIELD, UK
It sounds like a lust-struck dance anthem, but it is really a nervous, funny, self-mocking portrait of a teenage lad who can't take his eyes…
JOHNNY NASH · 1972
The world's sunniest song was reportedly written by a man recovering from eye surgery, and it was made in London by a Texan backed by Jamaic…
THE BOOMTOWN RATS · 1979
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA
The breezy piano anthem that millions hum on their way to work is actually about a 16-year-old girl who opened fire on a San Diego elementar…
THE CLASH · 1979
The Clash's most famous anthem of rebellion isn't a Clash song at all — it's a 1959 tune written by a Texan in Buddy Holly's old band, which…
MARVIN GAYE · 1968
DETROIT, USA
It sounds like a song about a cheating lover, but its real subject is the humiliation of being the last to know. Marvin Gaye turned a hit hi…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
The most anticipated album in pop history was launched not with a dance floor bomb but with the plainest love song Michael Jackson ever wrot…
KATY PERRY · 2008
"I Kissed a Girl" is less a coming-out anthem than a pastor's daughter staging her own escape from a sheltered upbringing, a calculated, pla…
MODERN ENGLISH · 1982
The breeziest love song of the MTV era is actually about two people making love as a nuclear bomb falls — a Cold War apocalypse anthem disgu…
JOHNNY CASH · 1956
"I Walk the Line" is a wedding vow set to a train rhythm: a 24-year-old Johnny Cash promising his young wife, Vivian, that he would stay fai…
RAMONES · 1978
The Ramones' most joyous-sounding anthem is actually a cry of exhaustion — Joey Ramone wrote it about being burned out, injured, and trapped…
WHITNEY HOUSTON · 1987
The most euphoric-sounding record of the 1980s is actually a song about being alone. Everything that matters sits in the part of the title p…
BACKSTREET BOYS · 1999
A song whose lyrics make no logical sense and yet, somehow, articulate the precise emotional grammar of a generation. Released in the spring…
THE BEATLES · 1963
WIMPOLE STREET, LONDON, UK
A song about the most modest request in the history of romance, holding hands, turned out to be the single that opened America to The Beatle…
THE JACKSON 5 · 1969
DETROIT, USA
It sounds like a sugary kid's tune, but "I Want You Back" is the desperate, fast-talking apology of someone who threw away love out of pride…
DOLLY PARTON · 1974
The greatest love ballad of the twentieth century isn't about romance at all — Dolly Parton wrote it as a resignation letter to her boss, a …
WHITNEY HOUSTON · 1992
The biggest romantic ballad of the twentieth century was not written as a love song at all — Dolly Parton wrote it in 1973 as a polite resig…
GLORIA GAYNOR · 1978
The biggest breakup anthem in pop history started life as a throwaway B-side, sung by a woman in a back brace who had just been dropped into…
STEVIE WONDER · 1976
Beneath one of the funkiest grooves ever recorded is a grown man confessing that he misses being a naughty kid: the scoldings, the petty cri…
CHICAGO · 1976
NEDERLAND, COLORADO, USA
The softest, most romantic record Chicago ever made was reportedly a last-minute filler track written to plug a hole in an album — and it be…
THE JACKSON 5 · 1970
Sung by an 11-year-old Michael Jackson, "I'll Be There" was Motown's deliberate pivot away from bubblegum pop into grown-up devotion — a son…
THE MONKEES · 1966
A song that sounds like pure sunshine is really the confession of a lifelong romantic cynic, written by a then-struggling Neil Diamond, who …
THE WHO · 1966
It sounds like a bright, bouncy mod single, but "I'm A Boy" is actually a scene from an abandoned science-fiction rock opera about a future …
THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP · 1967
"I'm A Man" sounds like a swaggering boast, but it was written by an eighteen-year-old Steve Winwood who was, in truth, barely past boyhood:…
JOHN LENNON · 1971
: "Imagine" is the song that turned a former Beatle into a secular saint — a piano hymn that proposes the dissolution of nations, religions,…
IRON BUTTERFLY · 1968
One of the most famous song titles in rock history is, by most accounts, a typo for the ear: a singer slurring "In the Garden of Eden" after…
50 CENT · 2003
The most famous birthday song of the 21st century was never meant for 50 Cent at all, and the man singing it had been declared commercially …
PHIL COLLINS · 1981
Despite the most famous urban legend in pop history, this is not a song about a man who watched someone drown. It is the raw, half-improvise…
THE JAM · 1977
"In the City" sounds like a punk anthem, but it's really a love letter from a suburban teenager to London itself — a declaration that the yo…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
"In the Closet" is Michael Jackson's sultriest record — a song about two lovers agreeing to keep their desire completely secret — and the br…
LINKIN PARK · 2001
The song the world now plays at graduations, in gyms and over sporting montages is, read closely, a song about futility — about pouring ever…
PETER GABRIEL · 1986
The world's favourite boombox-under-the-window love song was reportedly written to be deliberately ambiguous about who is being adored — a l…
LIL NAS X & JACK HARLOW · 2021
"Industry Baby" takes the nastiest insult thrown at Lil Nas X, that he was a manufactured, label-made fluke who would vanish after "Old Town…
GENESIS · 1986
CHIDDINGFOLD, SURREY, UK
Genesis' only American number one began as an accident — a throwaway phrase Phil Collins sang over a riff Mike Rutherford was idly playing —…
GOO GOO DOLLS · 1998
"Iris" sounds like the ultimate wedding-dance love song, but it was written in a few desperate hours by a songwriter who had nearly given up…
ALANIS MORISSETTE · 1996
A breezy pop-rock hit about life's cruel little coincidences became famous for an accidental joke: most of the bad-luck scenarios it lists a…
BEYONCÉ · 2006
A breakup anthem disguised as a logistical instruction manual, "Irreplaceable" turned the choreography of removing an unfaithful partner fro…
KENNY ROGERS AND DOLLY PARTON · 1983
The most beloved country duet of all time is not a country song at all. It was written by the Bee Gees as an R&B number, reportedly with Mar…
STEVIE WONDER · 1976
The song couples sway to at weddings is not a love song to a woman at all. It is a father's giddy announcement about his newborn daughter, A…
DESMOND DEKKER · 1968
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
It isn't a hymn or a Bible story at all. It's a working man's cry about grinding poverty in Kingston, wrapped in Rastafarian language of exi…
LENNY KRAVITZ · 1991
Lenny Kravitz's silkiest, most romantic single was reportedly written while his marriage to actress Lisa Bonet was falling apart — it isn't …
CELINE DION · 1996
Most people file it as a big, weepy nineties love song, but Jim Steinman wrote it as gothic horror — his attempt to turn Wuthering Heights i…
NSYNC · 2000
On the surface it is a cocky boy-band promise to win a hesitant girl's heart, but "It's Gonna Be Me" was really the sound of five young men …
BON JOVI · 2000
A defibrillator paddle pressed against the chest of a band the world had nearly written off, "It's My Life" was Bon Jovi's brazen leap from …
R.E.M. · 1987
ATHENS, GEORGIA, USA
The most famous apocalypse song in American rock reportedly began as a dream about a party where every guest shared the same initials, and i…
PEARL JAM · 1991
RICHARDSON, TEXAS, USA
"Jeremy" is about a real fifteen-year-old boy in suburban Dallas who shot himself in front of his English class in January 1991 — and the so…
RICK SPRINGFIELD · 1981
"Jessie's Girl" isn't a love song — it's a confession of jealousy about a real woman Rick Springfield met in a Pasadena stained-glass class,…
XXXTENTACION · 2017
"Jocelyn Flores" is not a love song or a breakup song. It is a two-minute act of grief named after a real 17-year-old girl who died by suici…
DOLLY PARTON · 1973
"Jolene" is not a cheating song or a catfight. It is a woman begging a rival not to take her man, and it is honest enough to admit she think…
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. · 1994
CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA
The most famous rags-to-riches record in rap is not really a boast about money — it is a thank-you note, addressed first to the people who s…
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. · 1994
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA
"Juicy" sounds like a victory lap, but it is really a letter written backwards in time: a 21-year-old from Brooklyn telling his broke, hungr…
VAN HALEN · 1984
: "Jump" was the sound of a hard rock band trading their guitars for synthesizers and accidentally inventing the template for mainstream eig…
LADY GAGA · 2008
The most relentlessly joyful pop single of its decade is actually a first-person account of being too drunk to stand up, written in roughly …
THE CURE · 1987
BEACHY HEAD, UK
The band famous for gloom wrote one of the most joyful love songs of the 1980s, inspired by a windswept night on the Sussex cliffs with Robe…
BRUNO MARS · 2010
A debut single engineered with the precision of a Brill Building factory and the warmth of a Stevie Wonder ballad, "Just the Way You Are" an…
RADIOHEAD · 1997
A surreal anthem of bureaucratic dread disguised as a piano ballad, "Karma Police" turned an inside joke from a Radiohead tour bus into one …
LED ZEPPELIN · 1975
: "Kashmir" is the eight-and-a-half-minute centerpiece of Led Zeppelin's 1975 double album Physical Graffiti, a song the band itself often c…
QUEEN · 1974
: "Killer Queen" was the song that turned Queen from a promising glam-rock curiosity into a band that could write hits on their own terms. F…
ROBERTA FLACK · 1973
It sounds like a love song, but nobody in it is in love — it is about sitting in an audience and realising a total stranger on stage has jus…
SADE · 1993
"Kiss of Life" sounds like a slow-dance seduction, but at its heart it is a song about being rescued. Sade borrows the British name for mout…
PRINCE · 1986
"Kiss" was written off as a scrappy throwaway, handed to a side project, and rebuilt by someone else — until Prince heard the result, took i…
BOB DYLAN · 1973
It is not a general-purpose hymn about mortality — Dylan wrote it as a specific death scene for a Sam Peckinpah western, the dying words of …
THE BEACH BOYS · 1988
ISLAMORADA, FLORIDA KEYS, USA
"Kokomo" is a love song to a tropical paradise that doesn't exist — written without Brian Wilson, by a band twenty years past its prime, for…
RITCHIE VALENS · 1958
VERACRUZ, MEXICO
The teenager who turned "La Bamba" into rock and roll reportedly barely spoke Spanish — he learned the words phonetically from relatives — a…
MADONNA · 1986
SAN PEDRO, AMBERGRIS CAYE, BELIZE
"La Isla Bonita" sounds like a sunny holiday postcard, but it is really a song about longing for a place you may never have been, written by…
SHAKIRA FT. ALEJANDRO SANZ · 2005
Behind the sweaty, hip-swinging groove, "La Tortura" is a break-up argument set to a dance beat: a man begs forgiveness for betrayal, and a …
ÉDITH PIAF · 1947
"La Vie en Rose" sounds like pure romantic bliss, but it was written by a woman who had survived poverty, wartime occupation and repeated he…
GENESIS · 1986
It looks like a global anti-war anthem, but "Land of Confusion" started as Mike Rutherford's private worry about the world his children woul…
DONNA SUMMER · 1978
"Last Dance" sounds like a desperate plea for romance, but it was written for a forgettable disco movie in a single overnight burst, became …
THE STROKES · 2001
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The song that relaunched guitar rock in the 2000s is built on a groove the band cheerfully admitted lifting from Tom Petty, and its lyric is…
DEREK AND THE DOMINOS · 1970
A seven-minute eruption of unrequited love disguised as a blues-rock epic, "Layla" is the sound of Eric Clapton burning down the temple of h…
CHIC · 1978
NEW YORK, USA
A four-on-the-floor revenge fantasy disguised as a party anthem. Born from a humiliating night when Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were tu…
BILL WITHERS · 1972
SLAB FORK, USA
: In 1972, a former Navy mechanic and aircraft-toilet assembler named Bill Withers sat at a Wurlitzer piano in Los Angeles and channeled the…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1989
On the surface "Leave Me Alone" sounds like a kiss-off to a clingy lover, but it is really Michael Jackson firing back at the tabloid press …
THE BEATLES · 1970
LONDON, UK
The world hears a hymn, but Paul McCartney wrote it after dreaming about his mother Mary, who had died of cancer when he was fourteen. The m…
MARVIN GAYE · 1973
The most famous seduction song ever recorded reportedly began life as a song about spiritual recovery and getting on with living, and Marvin…
DAVID BOWIE · 1983
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The biggest, shiniest hit of David Bowie's career is a song about dread, not joy: a dance-floor command built on the fairy tale of red shoes…
AVICII · 2011
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
The defining anthem of the EDM decade contains not a single word written by its maker. Its emotional core is a borrowed scrap of Etta James …
DUA LIPA · 2020
LONDON, UK
— When Dua Lipa released "Levitating" in the spring of 2020, the world was locked inside. The song's funk-pop pulse and disco-revival sparkl…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"Liar" isn't an abstract rant against politicians or the press — it's widely understood to be Johnny Rotten's venomous, point-blank characte…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
"Liberian Girl" is Michael Jackson's dreamiest love song to a woman he imagines rather than describes, and its famous African opening is sun…
EAGLES · 1976
LOS ANGELES, USA
It sounds like a celebration of speed and excess, but "Life in the Fast Lane" is really a cautionary tale about a couple burning themselves …
DAVID BOWIE · 1971
A cinematic ballad disguised as a glam-rock aria, "Life on Mars?" is David Bowie's most theatrical kiss-off to the dreary realities of 1970s…
MADONNA · 1989
"Like a Prayer" is a song that deliberately blurs the line between spiritual ecstasy and physical desire, written by a lapsed Catholic who h…
BOB DYLAN · 1965
NEW YORK CITY, USA
It is remembered as rock's great act of aggression, a six-minute sneer at a rich girl who lost everything, but "Like a Rolling Stone" began …
MADONNA · 1984
"Like a Virgin" was written by a man about the relief of finding real love after heartbreak, and it was never really about sex at all. Madon…
NIRVANA · 1991
"Lithium" is not Kurt Cobain's diary entry about his own medication — it is a short story he invented about a man who loses everything and g…
DOLLY PARTON · 2001
It sounds like a 200-year-old mountain ballad carried over from Britain and Ireland, but Dolly Parton wrote it herself — a deliberate act of…
OF MONSTERS AND MEN · 2011
Behind the brass fanfare and the shouted "hey!" is a quiet tragedy: an elderly woman is talking to her husband, who has died, and the two of…
OASIS · 1994
"Live Forever" is not a feel-good singalong about friendship — it is Noel Gallagher's deliberate counter-attack on grunge's self-loathing, w…
BON JOVI · 1986
WOODBRIDGE, NEW JERSEY, USA
The biggest arena anthem of the 1980s is really a recession song about two broke young people in a shuttered industrial town, and the band a…
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA · 1976
Behind its sunny strings and flamenco-flavoured violin, "Livin' Thing" is a breakup song in disguise: Jeff Lynne treats love as something al…
STEVIE WONDER · 1973
NEW YORK CITY, USA
Behind a funky groove, "Living for the City" is a seven-minute short film for the ears: it follows a Black family's hard-won dignity in Miss…
BRUNO MARS · 2012
"Locked Out of Heaven" sounds like a hymn but is really a sweaty love song: a man so overwhelmed by physical intimacy that he describes it a…
THE CLASH · 1979
LONDON, UK
— In December 1979, The Clash released a song that sounded less like a punk anthem and more like a transmission from a city on the edge of c…
EMINEM · 2002
DETROIT, USA
The most-used motivational anthem in sport is actually a song about panic — a minute-by-minute anatomy of stage fright and the fear of going…
R.E.M. · 1991
ATHENS, GEORGIA, USA
It is not about God. The title is an old Southern American expression for losing your temper or reaching the end of your patience, and the s…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 2014
It sounds like a breezy new disco single from 2014, but "Love Never Felt So Good" is actually a voice, a piano and a pair of snapping finger…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2008
A teenage country singer rewrites Shakespeare with a happy ending, accidentally inventing the template for modern pop crossover in the proce…
EMINEM FT. RIHANNA · 2010
The defining hook of 2010 was reportedly written by a broke, burned-out songwriter alone in the Oregon woods, and she had her record label i…
J. COLE · 2014
"Love Yourz" sounds like a gentle self-care anthem, but it is really a rapper at the height of his success admitting that the success did no…
BILLIE EILISH & KHALID · 2018
Despite its sweet title, "Lovely" is a song about being trapped inside your own head, written by a sixteen-year-old who was quietly struggli…
BILL WITHERS · 1977
"Lovely Day" is not a song about a day that happens to be lovely. It is a song about a man who wakes up braced for the worst, and who choose…
JUICE WRLD · 2018
"Lucid Dreams" sounds like a breakup song, but at its core it is about a mind that cannot switch off: a teenager haunted by a lost love so c…
THE BEATLES · 1967
A track that crystallized the psychedelic imagination of 1967 even as its authors insisted it was nothing of the sort. Born from a child's d…
LOS DEL RIO · 1993
SEVILLE, SPAIN
The biggest party record of the 1990s is not a party invitation at all — it is a sly little story about a woman whose boyfriend ships off to…
VILLAGE PEOPLE · 1978
"Macho Man" sounds like a muscle-flexing tribute to tough-guy masculinity, but it was born as a knowing wink from the gay clubs of 1970s New…
ABBA · 1975
— Released in 1975 as the lead single from ABBA's self-titled third album, "Mamma Mia" is a glittering pop confection about the helpless gra…
ALICE IN CHAINS · 1990
SEATTLE, USA
The song that made Alice in Chains famous reportedly began with a dinner-table remark about veal calves raised in crates, and Layne Staley t…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
The most famous protest song Michael Jackson ever sang wasn't actually written by him — and its radical message is that changing the world s…
JIMMY BUFFETT · 1977
KEY WEST, FLORIDA, USA
It sounds like a postcard from paradise, but "Margaritaville" is really a quiet song about a man drinking his way through a broken heart — a…
SANTANA FT. THE PRODUCT G&B · 1999
SPANISH HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Maria Maria" sounds like a breezy summer love song, but it is really a portrait of a young woman trying to stay beautiful and whole in a ne…
SANTANA FT. THE PRODUCT G&B · 1999
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
A late-career miracle from a guitarist many had written off, "Maria Maria" fused West Side Story romance with Spanish Harlem rhythm and Bay …
DRAKE · 2011
HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, USA
"Marvins Room" isn't a love song. It's a drunk dial recorded as a confession: a newly famous man calls an ex who has moved on, and in the pr…
SÉRGIO MENDES · 1966
The song that taught the world to sing in Portuguese without knowing a single word is really a cheeky street-level shout of "oh, come on, ge…
FUTURE · 2017
Behind its hypnotic flute and its infamous chant about pills, "Mask Off" is a song about Future dropping the disguise, built on a sample fro…
METALLICA · 1986
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
The most famous thrash metal song ever written is not about war, Satan, or politics — it is a first-person monologue delivered by a drug, br…
MADONNA · 1984
"Material Girl" is not Madonna's confession of greed. It is a wink, a piece of role-play written by two men and performed by a woman who und…
DOLLY PARTON · 1977
Tucked inside Dolly Parton's glossiest, most commercial pop album is a bleak Appalachian death ballad about an abandoned little girl and her…
THE POLICE · 1979
A castaway on a remote island hurls a sealed plea into the surf, only to discover, a year later, that he is one of millions of lonely souls …
GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS · 1973
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA
The most famous train in soul music started life as a plane to Houston, inspired by a casual phone call with a young Farrah Fawcett. In Glad…
SHECK WES · 2017
"Mo Bamba" sounds like pure chaos, but it is really a teenager from Harlem naming his ambition after a childhood friend who was about to mak…
EMINEM · 2004
"Mockingbird" is a lullaby from the most feared rapper on the planet to his daughter Hailie and his niece Alaina. It is also a confession th…
LIL WAYNE · 2018
"Mona Lisa" is not a love song and not an art reference so much as a crime story told from both ends: Lil Wayne plays the mastermind who sen…
ABBA · 1976
It sounds like a cheerful anthem to getting rich, but "Money, Money, Money" is really a minor-key lament about a woman trapped in drudgery, …
PINK FLOYD · 1973
"Money" is not a protest song against greed so much as a piece of ventriloquism, with Roger Waters sneering in the voice of the man who alre…
BOBBY PICKETT · 1962
"Monster Mash" is not really a Halloween song at all. It is a sly parody of the early-1960s dance-craze record, sung by an out-of-work actor…
LIL NAS X · 2021
On the surface it is a cheeky, flamenco-flavoured song about lusting after a man who will not commit, but its real subject is a gay kid from…
BOSTON · 1976
WATERTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
The arena-rock anthem that launched a thousand air-guitar solos was actually built in a basement by a meticulous MIT-trained engineer, and b…
THE KILLERS · 2003
LAS VEGAS, USA
Britain's longest-charting song of all time is a real-time panic attack about catching a girlfriend with another man in a British-themed pub…
COUNTING CROWS · 1993
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
"Mr. Jones" sounds like a sunny anthem about wanting to be famous, but it is really a drunken late-night confession from two broke musicians…
STYX · 1983
It sounds like a goofy robot novelty hit, but "Mr. Roboto" is actually a track from a full-blown sci-fi rock opera about a rock star who esc…
BOB DYLAN · 1965
NEW ORLEANS, USA
The mysterious piper everyone assumed was a drug dealer was, by Dylan's own account, a real session musician carrying an enormous Turkish fr…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1968
The song attached forever to cinema's most famous seduction is not about seduction, and was not even written about Mrs. Robinson. It began a…
OUTKAST · 2000
"Ms. Jackson" is not a breakup song aimed at an ex. It is an apology addressed to her mother, written by André 3000 after his split from Ery…
THE TEMPTATIONS · 1964
— In December 1964, in a Detroit studio owned by a former boxer turned mogul, a self-taught songwriter named Smokey Robinson handed a lovesi…
CELINE DION · 1997
The most famous love song of the 1990s was made behind the director's back, nearly refused by the singer, and the take that conquered the pl…
MITSKI · 2023
It sounds like a tender moonlit love song, but it is really a song about dying — a woman taking inventory of everything she owns, finding th…
FRANK SINATRA · 1969
The ultimate anthem of self-made triumph started life as a bleak French song about a couple sleepwalking through a dead marriage, was rewrit…
SID VICIOUS · 1978
Sid Vicious's "My Way" isn't a cover — it's an assassination. By dragging Frank Sinatra's dignified deathbed anthem through the gutter, a 20…
NAS · 1994
QUEENSBRIDGE, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY, USA
"N.Y. State of Mind" is not a celebration of New York at all. It is a twenty-year-old's sleepless field report from inside the Queensbridge …
THE DAMNED · 1977
"Neat Neat Neat" is two minutes and forty seconds of nihilist street poetry disguised as a rock and roll song — a snapshot of broke, restles…
THE JACKSON 5 · 1971
It sounds like a tender teen-pop ballad, but "Never Can Say Goodbye" is really a portrait of someone trapped in a relationship they keep try…
RICK ASTLEY · 1987
The internet's favorite punchline started life as a deadly serious promise of loyalty — written by Britain's most ruthless hit factory and s…
EAGLES · 1976
It sounds like a gentle love song about a charming stranger, but "New Kid in Town" is really the Eagles writing about their own fear of bein…
THE DAMNED · 1976
"New Rose" — widely celebrated as the first UK punk single ever released — isn't a song of rage at all. Beneath the fastest, loudest racket …
DUA LIPA · 2017
"New Rules" sounds like a breakup anthem, but it is really a song about relapse: a woman who keeps letting the wrong person back in, writing…
FRANK SINATRA · 1980
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The world's most famous anthem of big-city triumph wasn't written for Sinatra at all. It was a second-draft movie song for Liza Minnelli tha…
BEE GEES · 1977
MIAMI, USA
Recorded in a converted French chateau and finished in a Miami beachside studio, "Night Fever" became the velvet-edged heartbeat of the disc…
BOB SEGER · 1976
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, USA
It sounds like a nostalgic song about teenage sex in the back of a car, and for two-thirds of its length it is. Then it turns into something…
BLACKSTREET · 1996
"No Diggity" is a smooth, swaggering ode to a woman who has her own money, her own mind, and zero need for any man — and one of its biggest …
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"No Feelings" isn't a love song gone wrong — it's a savage satire of narcissism, sung in the voice of a character so in love with himself th…
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE · 2002
VAN NUYS, LOS ANGELES, USA
The biggest radio hit of Queens of the Stone Age's career sits inside an album built to mock radio, and its title is not a riddle to be solv…
BLIND MELON · 1992
The sunniest-sounding hit of the grunge era is actually a song about clinical depression, written by the band's bass player about a girlfrie…
J. COLE · 2014
Beneath the swagger, the party-ready bounce and the jokes about Hollywood dating, "No Role Modelz" is a song about a fatherless young man wh…
RADIOHEAD · 1997
A lullaby sung from inside a sealed-off life. Radiohead's "No Surprises," released as the third single from OK Computer in 1997, dresses des…
BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · 1974
TRENCHTOWN, KINGSTON, JAMAICA
It is not a breakup song and it is not about avoiding women. "No Woman No Cry" is a man comforting the woman he loves, telling her not to we…
BOB MARLEY · 1975
TRENCH TOWN, KINGSTON, JAMAICA
It is not a shrug about avoiding women, and it is not really a love song either. "No Woman, No Cry" is Bob Marley sitting with someone in gr…
ÉDITH PIAF · 1960
The song that sounds like a lifetime of defiance was written by two men Piaf had refused to meet, recorded by a woman doctors said should no…
DRAKE · 2018
"Nonstop" sounds like a cocky victory lap, but it is really Drake reasserting control at the most exposed moment of his career, a Memphis-bu…
THE BEATLES · 1965
LONDON, UK
It sounds like a wistful folk reverie about a girl and a cosy wooden room, but "Norwegian Wood" is John Lennon's deliberately coded confessi…
EMINEM · 2010
DETROIT, USA
The biggest comeback single of Eminem's career is really a sobriety letter set to a stadium beat — a man roughly two years clean apologising…
METALLICA · 1991
A late-night phone call between a homesick frontman and his girlfriend became, almost by accident, the most tender song ever written by a th…
GUNS N' ROSES · 1991
A nearly nine-minute orchestral power ballad released at the peak of hair-metal's last gasp, "November Rain" is the song where Axl Rose stop…
EELS · 1996
"Novocaine for the Soul" sounds like a plea to feel nothing, but it is really the cry of someone so numb that he would welcome any feeling a…
LINKIN PARK · 2003
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, USA
The world files "Numb" as the ultimate teenager-versus-parent anthem, but it was written by six men in their twenties being crushed by the e…
DR. DRE FT. SNOOP DOGG · 1992
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, USA
It sounds like the laziest, sunniest party record ever made, but "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" was a carefully built declaration of independence…
BILLIE EILISH · 2016
"Ocean Eyes" was never meant to launch a career. It was a song her older brother had written for his own band, recorded by a 13-year-old so …
BOBBIE GENTRY · 1967
TALLAHATCHIE RIVER, MISSISSIPPI, USA
"Ode to Billie Joe" isn't really about what got thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge — Bobbie Gentry always insisted that's a red herring. The…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1979
"Off the Wall" is Michael Jackson's joyful manifesto of liberation — the moment a young man who had been a working entertainer since childho…
X-RAY SPEX · 1977
Despite the leather-and-chains title, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" was never about kink — it's a 19-year-old mixed-race woman from south London de…
LIL NAS X · 2019
ATLANTA, USA
A 19-year-old kid from Atlanta bought a $30 beat online, recorded a song about horses in a closet, and rewrote the rulebook of American popu…
DRAKE · 2016
The most inescapable song of 2016 was built on the bones of a London club record from 2008 that the British music industry had already moved…
BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · 1977
"One Love" sounds like a sunny invitation to hold hands, but it was written by a young man from a violent Kingston ghetto and re-recorded in…
BOB MARLEY · 1977
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
The world's gentlest peace anthem was written in a city where political gunmen were killing each other in the streets, and its most famous v…
METALLICA · 1988
Metallica's breakthrough ballad-turned-assault is not a straightforward anti-war anthem but a horror story about consciousness with nowhere …
NAS · 2002
"One Mic" is not a boast about rap skill. It is a confession of how little a man actually needs to survive, change his life and speak the tr…
DAFT PUNK · 2000
PARIS, FRANCE
The happiest-sounding dance record of the century is secretly a song about endings — a plea shouted at a DJ as the lights come up — and the …
MURRAY HEAD · 1984
BANGKOK, THAILAND
The decade's most famous song about Bangkok is actually a song about chess — sung in character by an arrogant grandmaster who finds the city…
U2 · 1991
A song often mistaken for a wedding hymn is, on closer listening, an argument between two people who can no longer pretend. Born during the …
BLONDIE · 1978
It sounds like a cheeky, flirtatious chase song, but Debbie Harry wrote it from a darker place: her own experience of being stalked by an ex…
BRITNEY SPEARS · 2000
A red latex catsuit, a Mars expedition, and a recovered necklace from the bottom of the ocean: in the spring of 2000, Britney Spears release…
JOURNEY · 1981
"Open Arms" is the power ballad that arguably invented the modern power ballad — a slow-burning, piano-led plea written by Steve Perry and J…
THE GO-GO'S · 1981
Behind one of the sunniest pop songs of the early eighties is a secret love affair between Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall of …
SANTANA · 1970
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
A cha-cha-chá written by a Cuban bandleader in 1963 New York, reborn seven years later in a San Francisco recording studio as a psychedelic …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1983
LOS ANGELES, USA
It sounds like Michael Jackson at his most carefree, but "P.Y.T." was actually a high-precision pop machine engineered by Quincy Jones and a…
THE ROLLING STONES · 1966
A funeral march disguised as a pop single, "Paint It Black" arrived in 1966 as a sitar-laced howl from inside a grieving mind. Written large…
VAN HALEN · 1984
: "Panama" is the most misunderstood track on Van Halen's blockbuster 1984 — a song that sounds like a tropical postcard but is actually abo…
MADONNA · 1986
NEW YORK CITY, USA
It sounds like a bouncy pop anthem, but "Papa Don't Preach" is a teenage girl telling her father she's pregnant and that, against everyone's…
JAMES BROWN · 1965
On the surface it is a cheerful song about a middle-aged man who refuses to sit out the latest dance crazes, but underneath it is James Brow…
THE TEMPTATIONS · 1972
DETROIT, MICHIGAN, USA
The most celebrated Temptations record of the 1970s is a song the Temptations themselves reportedly didn't want to make — a cinematic, twelv…
GUNS N' ROSES · 1987
A six-and-a-half-minute fever dream that opens with a wistful acoustic shimmer and ends in a tempo-doubled stampede, Paradise City is Guns N…
COLDPLAY · 2011
"Paradise" is not a song about bliss. It is a quiet story about a disappointed child who survives by daydreaming, wrapped in the largest str…
RADIOHEAD · 1997
ST CATHERINE'S COURT, BATH, UK
The song that made Radiohead sound like prophets of the digital age started as something much smaller and nastier: a bad night in a Los Ange…
BLUR · 1994
"Parklife" sounds like a cheeky singalong about lazing around in the park, but it is really a sly, affectionate portrait of English routine …
GUNS N' ROSES · 1988
LOS ANGELES, USA
The most tender song in the Guns N' Roses catalogue is not really a love song at all — it is a plea for time, written by a guitarist whose r…
LOU REED · 1972
NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Perfect Day" sounds like the gentlest love song Lou Reed ever wrote — and it probably is one — but underneath the sangria and the sunshine …
ED SHEERAN · 2017
"Perfect" sounds like a man telling a woman she is flawless, but it is really a song about being chosen while still unfinished — written for…
ED SHEERAN · 2014
"Photograph" is not really a love song — it is a song about distance, and about choosing to keep an ache because the ache is the last piece …
BILLY JOEL · 1973
LOS ANGELES, USA
"Piano Man" sounds like a cosy pub singalong, but it is really a young musician's undercover report from rock bottom: Billy Joel, hiding fro…
WILD CHERRY · 1976
STEUBENVILLE, OHIO, USA
"Play That Funky Music" isn't a party anthem someone dreamed up in a studio — it's a hard-rock band's true story of being heckled by a disco…
STONE TEMPLE PILOTS · 1992
"Plush" sounds like a lovelorn grunge ballad, but Scott Weiland reportedly built it from a grim newspaper story about a missing woman, then …
LADY GAGA · 2008
A synth-pop juggernaut disguised as a casino anthem, "Poker Face" launched Stefani Germanotta into global stardom by smuggling queer bisexua…
GINUWINE · 1996
"Pony" sounds like the smoothest seduction record of the '90s, but its real story is a sonic revolution — a young Timbaland building a slipp…
KANYE WEST · 2010
"Power" sounds like a victory lap, but it is really a confession from a man at the lowest point of his public life, admitting that the force…
A$AP ROCKY · 2018
It sounds like a lazy, flute-led smoking anthem, but "Praise The Lord (Da Shine)" is really a thank-you note from two men who came up with n…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"Pretty Vacant" isn't a celebration of stupidity — it's a weaponized refusal. The Sex Pistols took the insult Britain hurled at its jobless …
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"Problems" isn't a tantrum — it's a declaration of war on the idea that a working-class kid's frustrations are his fault. The Sex Pistols fl…
PETER, PAUL AND MARY · 1963
Despite half a century of smirking rumors, "Puff, the Magic Dragon" has nothing to do with drugs — it's a heartbreakingly sincere song about…
FOSTER THE PEOPLE · 2010
LOS ANGELES, USA
The whistled, sun-bleached song of the summer is sung from inside the head of a boy who has found his father's gun, and the cheerful chorus …
JIMI HENDRIX · 1967
A two-minute-fifty-second detonation that announced a new vocabulary for the electric guitar, "Purple Haze" arrived in the spring of 1967 as…
PRINCE · 1984
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
The most cathartic ballad of the 1980s is not really a love song, and it was not built in a studio. It is an apology and a plea for forgiven…
ARCTIC MONKEYS · 2012
It sounds like the most swaggering, self-assured riff Arctic Monkeys ever wrote, but "R U Mine?" is actually a man losing his nerve: a quest…
QUEEN · 1984
Queen's shimmering synth anthem is a eulogy for radio written by a drummer who had just watched MTV eat the thing he loved — and its revenge…
IMAGINE DRAGONS · 2012
It sounds like a song about the end of the world, but "Radioactive" is really about one person's private awakening: a young man who had spen…
EMINEM · 2013
"Rap God" sounds like the loudest boast in hip-hop history, but underneath the speed records it is a 41-year-old veteran's anxious argument …
THE SUGARHILL GANG · 1979
ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY, USA
The record that introduced hip-hop to the world was made by three men who were mostly unknown on the Bronx scene, assembled in a hurry by a …
ARCADE FIRE · 2004
MONTREAL, CANADA
The biggest singalong on an album called Funeral is not a political protest song at all. It starts with the smallest lie in the world, the o…
CHILDISH GAMBINO · 2016
Behind its silky, slow-burning funk groove, "Redbone" is a song about paranoia, about a man lying awake and sensing that his lover is slippi…
BOB MARLEY · 1980
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
"Redemption Song" is not a reggae song at all — it is one man, one acoustic guitar, and no band, written while Bob Marley reportedly already…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1992
On the surface it's a sleek new jack swing groove about a man begging an ex-lover to recall how good things used to be — but it's really a q…
THE STROKES · 2003
NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Reptilia" sounds like a swaggering rock song about a doomed relationship, but it reads much more convincingly as a cold-eyed confrontation …
ARETHA FRANKLIN · 1967
MEMPHIS, USA
In 1967, Aretha Franklin took a swaggering Otis Redding blues number about a tired husband begging for some appreciation when he got home, a…
MARK MORRISON · 1996
LEICESTER, UK
It sounds like a swaggering celebration of a player walking back into the room, but "Return of the Mack" is really a revenge anthem about a …
FLEETWOOD MAC · 1976
Stevie Nicks wrote "Rhiannon" after picking up a throwaway paperback novel, having no idea that the name belonged to a genuine Welsh goddess…
JANET JACKSON · 1989
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
Behind its military precision and unstoppable groove, "Rhythm Nation" is a protest song in disguise — Janet Jackson dreaming up a colour-bli…
HALL & OATES · 1976
The most famous song ever written about a spoilt heiress isn't about a woman at all — Daryl Hall reportedly wrote it about his girlfriend's …
JOHNNY CASH · 1963
"Ring of Fire" is Johnny Cash's biggest hit, but he didn't write it. June Carter did, reportedly while she was falling in love with him, bot…
DURAN DURAN · 1982
"Rio" sounds like a love song to a glamorous woman on a tropical beach, but by the band's own telling the girl is a stand-in for America its…
GRATEFUL DEAD · 1970
"Ripple" sounds like an ancient hymn, but it is a song about refusing to be a preacher: lyricist Robert Hunter builds a benediction that qui…
VANCE JOY · 2013
"Riptide" sounds like a sunny ukulele love song, but underneath the strumming it is a nervous, tangled portrait of anxiety: falling for some…
JUICE WRLD · 2019
"Robbery" sounds like a breakup ballad, but at its core it is a confession that love left Juice WRLD feeling burgled, and that he reached fo…
KISS · 1975
Kiss's ultimate party anthem was written on orders from a nervous record boss who needed a hit, and the studio version flopped. It only beca…
THE CLASH · 1982
The Clash's biggest American hit is a satirical fable about a king who bans rock music and a population that refuses to stop dancing — writt…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1979
A glittering bridge between the dying disco era and the synth-driven pop future, "Rock with You" finds a twenty-one-year-old Michael Jackson…
RAMONES · 1977
The sunniest song the Ramones ever recorded was written by the band's darkest member — bassist Dee Dee Ramone, a troubled kid from Queens wh…
DEF LEPPARD · 1987
"Rocket" isn't a song about spaceflight at all — it's a love letter to the glam rock of the band's Sheffield childhood, bolted onto a thunde…
POST MALONE · 2017
"Rockstar" sounds like a victory lap for excess, but at its core it is a hip-hop song staking a claim to rock and roll's old crown, and it c…
ADELE · 2010
It is not really a breakup song. It is a reply to an insult — Adele has said the track came out of being told her life without him would be …
TOTO · 1982
"Rosanna" borrows the name of a real Hollywood actress, Rosanna Arquette, who was then dating Toto's keyboard player, but the heartbreak in …
LYNN ANDERSON · 1970
"Rose Garden" sounds like a sunny love song, but it is really a polite refusal to sell fairy tales: the singer tells her partner that life t…
THE POLICE · 1978
PARIS, FRANCE
A reedy tenor voice climbs an impossible interval, a guitar chimes a hollow minor-seventh, and a young trio from London accidentally invents…
LORDE · 2013
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
"Royals" is not a protest song against the rich so much as a teenager's shrug at a fantasy she was never invited into. A 15-year-old in subu…
KANYE WEST · 2010
HONOLULU, HAWAII, USA
"Runaway" is not a love song so much as a confession dressed up as a toast: a man who knows he will hurt the people close to him, raising a …
NATHANIEL RATELIFF & THE NIGHT SWEATS · 2015
COTTAGE GROVE, OREGON, USA
The biggest drinking singalong of the 2010s is not a drinking song at all — "S.O.B." is a first-person account of alcohol withdrawal, writte…
XXXTENTACION · 2018
Underneath its bouncy, almost nursery-rhyme beat, "SAD!" is a short, blunt confession of a young man who ties his will to live to a relation…
RIHANNA · 2010
On the surface "S&M" is a cheeky club anthem about kinky pleasure, but underneath it is Rihanna's sharpest answer to the tabloid press that …
THE ROLLING STONES · 1965
A fuzzed-out guitar riff that allegedly came to Keith Richards in a Florida motel half-asleep became the sound of postwar consumer disillusi…
MEGAN THEE STALLION · 2020
"Savage" sounds like a pure brag track, but at its heart it is a song about refusing to be reduced to one adjective, written by a young woma…
THE WEEKND · 2020
Behind the bright, roller-disco synths, "Save Your Tears" is a confession from the person who did the leaving: a man who broke someone's hea…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1966
SCARBOROUGH, NORTH YORKSHIRE, UK
It sounds like the gentlest love song ever recorded, but it is a centuries-old English riddle ballad about a reunion that can never happen —…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1995
"Scream" is the sound of the most famous man on Earth losing his patience with the press — a furious, industrial-funk duet with his little s…
THE STOOGES · 1973
"Search and Destroy" isn't just a proto-punk rampage — it's a Vietnam-era distress signal from a band left for dead, with Iggy Pop casting h…
TERRY JACKS · 1974
The biggest tearjerker of 1974 began life as a bitter, sarcastic French chanson about a dying man saying goodbye to the wife who cheated on …
MAC MILLER · 2018
"Self Care" sounds like a wellness slogan, but it is really a two-part confession about choosing yourself after public humiliation, heartbre…
THIRD EYE BLIND · 1997
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
It sounds like the sunniest pop song of the late 90s, but "Semi-Charmed Life" is actually a brutally honest portrait of crystal meth addicti…
EARTH WIND & FIRE · 1978
LOS ANGELES, USA
A glittering disco-funk anthem cooked up in a Los Angeles studio in the autumn of 1978, "September" has quietly become one of the most-playe…
ADELE · 2011
A symphonic torch song that turned the private theater of heartbreak into a stadium-sized catharsis, "Set Fire to the Rain" arrived in 2011 …
THE WHITE STRIPES · 2003
The riff sung in stadiums from Milan to Glastonbury started as a soundcheck doodle and a misheard childhood phrase, and the song itself is a…
THE WHITE STRIPES · 2003
LONDON, UK
The most-chanted riff in world football is not a bass line, was not written for stadiums, and was reportedly being saved for a James Bond th…
JAMES BROWN · 1970
Despite the title, "Sex Machine" is less a song about sex than a song about a band: it is the sound of James Brown rebuilding his group from…
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE · 2006
On the surface "SexyBack" is a swaggering club strut, but underneath it was a calculated act of reinvention: a former boy-band heartthrob bu…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2014
A horn-driven pop confection that doubled as Taylor Swift's public divorce papers from Nashville, "Shake It Off" is less a song about haters…
THE JACKSONS · 1979
On the surface it's a pure dance-floor command, but underneath it's a love song dressed up as a party — a man begging a reluctant woman to s…
LADY GAGA & BRADLEY COOPER · 2018
A film song that became a generational anthem, "Shallow" turned a fictional duet between a fading country-rock star and an unknown bar singe…
ED SHEERAN · 2017
"Shape of You" is the song that broke streaming. Released in January 2017 as a surprise double A-side with "Castle on the Hill," it became t…
RAMONES · 1977
Beneath its bubblegum buzz, "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" is Joey Ramone's love letter to the outsider girl who walks away from the mainstream —…
JAMES · 1997
"She's a Star" sounds like a radio-ready love song, but it is really a pep talk aimed at someone who cannot see her own light, written by a …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1979
The most devastating ballad Michael Jackson ever sang was not his song, was not written for him, and was never meant to end in tears — Quinc…
PINK FLOYD · 1975
ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS, LONDON, UK
Pink Floyd's 26-minute elegy is a letter to Syd Barrett, the founder they had quietly edged out seven years earlier. The eeriest part of the…
R.E.M. · 1991
ATHENS, GEORGIA, USA
The bubbliest song R.E.M. ever released is widely believed to have taken its title from Chinese state propaganda circulated after the 1989 T…
THE CLASH · 1982
Released in 1982 on Combat Rock, The Clash's most playful single is also their most haunted — a punk-rockabilly hybrid written by a band alr…
PETER FRAMPTON · 1976
It sounds like a spiritual plea, and Bono once told Frampton he heard it as a prayer, but Frampton has said the words were about a real woma…
TRAVIS SCOTT · 2018
HOUSTON, USA
"Sicko Mode" is not one song but three, bolted together from orphaned beats by producers who never shared a room, and the voice anchoring it…
HARRY STYLES · 2017
PORT ANTONIO, JAMAICA
Harry Styles' first solo single sounds like a grand farewell to his boy-band years, but he has said it was imagined as the last words of a m…
WINGS · 1976
Paul McCartney was tired of critics calling him a soft-headed sentimentalist, so he wrote the sweetest, sunniest love song he could and made…
SEX PISTOLS · 1979
"Silly Thing" is a Sex Pistols hit recorded after Johnny Rotten had already quit the band — written and sung by drummer Paul Cook and guitar…
BEYONCÉ · 2008
A clipped, hand-clap-driven anthem that arrived disguised as a wedding-reception novelty and turned out to be one of the defining pop record…
NINA SIMONE · 1965
"Sinnerman" is not a Nina Simone composition at all but a centuries-old spiritual she learned as a preacher's daughter in rural North Caroli…
STEVIE WONDER · 1976
"Sir Duke" sounds like a pure party record, but it is really a thank-you letter from one generation of Black American genius to another: a e…
OTIS REDDING · 1968
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
Otis Redding's final single, recorded just days before his death in a December 1967 plane crash, became the first posthumous No. 1 in U.S. c…
ADELE · 2012
A torch song dressed as a spy theme, "Skyfall" reframed the James Bond opening sequence as a meditation on collapse, loyalty, and the strang…
PETER GABRIEL · 1986
BATH, UK
Behind the goofy claymation chickens and the brass-band groove, "Sledgehammer" is one of pop's most cheerfully unsubtle sex songs — a former…
GOO GOO DOLLS · 1998
Under its bright, sunny guitar jangle, "Slide" tells the story of a young Catholic couple facing an unplanned pregnancy, with a boy quietly …
NIRVANA · 1991
: A scuffed, sarcastic anthem written almost as a joke became the song that detonated mainstream rock and dragged underground culture into t…
DEEP PURPLE · 1972
MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND
The most famous riff in rock is attached to a piece of straight news reporting: on 4 December 1971 a concert hall on Lake Geneva burned down…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
Behind the slick funk and the gravity-defying lean, "Smooth Criminal" is a frantic crime-scene report about a woman named Annie who has been…
SANTANA FT. ROB THOMAS · 1999
"Smooth" sounds like a sultry summer seduction, but at its heart it is a young rock singer's love letter to his Puerto Rican wife, wrapped a…
SANTANA FT. ROB THOMAS · 1999
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
A 52-year-old guitar legend, a 27-year-old pop-rock frontman, and a song that nobody quite asked for became the unlikeliest comeback story o…
SANTANA FT. ROB THOMAS · 1999
EAST HARLEM (SPANISH HARLEM), NEW YORK CITY, USA
The biggest hit of Carlos Santana's life began as a sleazy song about a hotel room tryst called "Room 17," was rewritten into a love letter …
PETER GABRIEL · 1977
LITTLE SOLSBURY HILL, NEAR BATH, SOMERSET, UK
"Solsbury Hill" sounds like a triumphant anthem, but it's actually Peter Gabriel's resignation letter — a coded account of the night he deci…
OASIS · 1995
Released in April 1995, "Some Might Say" was the first Oasis single to top the UK charts, arriving like a battered chariot at the gates of w…
FUN. · 2012
Behind the stomping drums and stadium chant, "Some Nights" is a sleepless confession from a man in his thirties who has finally got the succ…
GOTYE · 2011
MORNINGTON PENINSULA, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
The biggest song of 2012 is not a breakup anthem — it is a trap. The first half invites you to side with a wounded man, then Kimbra's verse …
QUEEN · 1976
: Queen's "Somebody to Love" is a gospel-shaped rock prayer — a single voice multitracked into a choir of one hundred, asking the oldest que…
THE KILLERS · 2004
LAS VEGAS, USA
A neon-lit declaration of identity confusion delivered with dance-punk urgency, "Somebody Told Me" became the Killers' breakout single and a…
ADELE · 2011
A piano, a voice, and a wound that refuses to scab over. "Someone Like You" arrived in 2011 as the closing track of Adele's 21, and within m…
THE BEATLES · 1969
ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS, LONDON, UK
The most covered love song the Beatles ever recorded opens with a line George Harrison borrowed from someone else as a placeholder, was writ…
LINKIN PARK · 2003
The song that millions of teenagers heard as a cry about not fitting in was, by Mike Shinoda's own account, born from something far more mun…
BLUR · 1997
The two-minute scream that made Blur famous in America was never meant to be taken seriously — it is widely understood as a cartoon of the l…
JAY-Z · 2001
"Song Cry" is a breakup confession from a man who has been taught that real men never shed tears. He can't let himself weep, so he builds a …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 2026
TL;DR: From "I Want You Back" to "Stranger in Moscow," here is every major song in the Michael Jackson biopic — and the real story behind ea…
SAM & DAVE · 1967
MEMPHIS, USA
In the long, hot summer of 1967, as American cities burned and civil rights anger boiled over, two Black singers from Miami stepped into a M…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1964
The song is not really about quiet. It is about people who talk without saying anything and hear without listening, and it only became a hit…
DAVID BOWIE · 1969
A folk-acoustic ballad disguised as a science-fiction broadcast, "Space Oddity" arrived just nine days before Apollo 11 lifted off, and it h…
BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS · 1969
Behind the brass-blasting good cheer, "Spinning Wheel" is a hard-earned warning about ego and the cyclical cruelty of fame, written by a Bri…
LED ZEPPELIN · 1971
: Released on Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album in November 1971, "Stairway to Heaven" became the defining rock epic of the 1970s — an ei…
EMINEM · 2000
"Stan" is a four-letter correspondence in which a fan writes himself into a murder-suicide and his hero writes back too late — and it is sec…
BEN E. KING · 1961
A spiritual rewritten as a love song, "Stand By Me" turned a Baptist hymn's plea for divine presence into a secular meditation on companions…
THE WEEKND FT. DAFT PUNK · 2016
"Starboy" sounds like a victory lap, but underneath the supercars and swagger it is a funeral. The Weeknd uses the song to kill off his old …
DAVID BOWIE · 1972
A glittering science-fiction parable disguised as a pop single, "Starman" arrived in the spring of 1972 as the gateway drug to Bowie's Ziggy…
THE ROLLING STONES · 1981
BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT, PARIS, FRANCE
The most explosive guitar riff of the Rolling Stones' later career spent roughly three years rotting in a tape box, mislabelled as a failed …
THE KID LAROI & JUSTIN BIEBER · 2021
Beneath its sprinting synths and stadium-sized hook, "Stay" is a confession of failure: a narrator who keeps breaking the same promises, kno…
SAM SMITH · 2014
"Stay With Me" sounds like a cathedral-sized love song, but it is really about a one-night stand and the humiliating, very human wish that a…
BEE GEES · 1977
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA
Beneath the glitter and the strut, "Stayin' Alive" is a song about scraping by: a working-class man in a broke, battered 1970s New York usin…
OASIS · 2002
A weary, almost hymnal ballad released into a world still dazed by the events of the previous September, "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" found …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1995
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
Behind the cold beauty of "Stranger in Moscow" is one of the loneliest songs Michael Jackson ever made — written in a hotel room far from ho…
THE BEATLES · 1967
LIVERPOOL, UK
A hallucinatory dispatch from John Lennon's Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever" turned a Salvation Army orphanage garden into a…
GARBAGE · 1995
MADISON, WISCONSIN, USA
It sounds like a takedown of a vain girl, but "Stupid Girl" is really an attack on a pose — the fashionable 1990s habit of pretending to car…
TAYLOR SWIFT · 2014
"Style" sounds like a sleek, late-night driving song about fashion and cool, but it is really about a relationship that can never quite end.…
SEX PISTOLS · 1977
"Submission" is the Sex Pistols' inside joke at their own manager's expense — Malcolm McLaren ordered a kinky bondage anthem to promote his …
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. · 1994
The closing track of Ready to Die is staged as a late-night phone call from a 22-year-old Biggie to Puff Daddy, in which the rapper who had …
KYU SAKAMOTO · 1961
The breezy, whistled tune that topped the American charts in 1963 under the name of a beef hotpot is really about a man walking alone at nig…
BRYAN ADAMS · 1985
Despite its title, "Summer of '69" isn't really about 1969 at all — Bryan Adams was only nine years old that summer. It's a song about the i…
ELLA FITZGERALD & LOUIS ARMSTRONG · 1957
CHARLESTON, USA
"Summertime" sounds like a lazy lullaby about easy days, but it was written for a Black fishing community in 1930s Charleston, where a mothe…
LANA DEL REY · 2012
"Summertime Sadness" sounds like a sultry summer love song, but at its core it is a farewell: a portrait of love so intense that the singer …
U2 · 1983
DERRY, UK
A martial snare, a chiming guitar figure, and a refusal: this is not a rebel song. With "Sunday Bloody Sunday," U2 took the most loaded poli…
BOBBY HEBB · 1966
"Sunny" sounds like the happiest song of 1966, but it was born from a double tragedy — President Kennedy's assassination and the murder of B…
STEVIE WONDER · 1972
SAGINAW, USA
In 1972, a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder wrestled control of his career from Motown, plugged a brand-new Hohner Clavinet into a fuzz pedal, and …
NEIL DIAMOND · 1969
A three-minute pop confection from a Brill Building graduate trying to outrun his own past, "Sweet Caroline" arrived in the summer of 1969 w…
GUNS N' ROSES · 1987
The most recognisable guitar riff in American rock began as a joke — a finger-twisting warm-up exercise Slash was goofing around with and re…
EURYTHMICS · 1983
It sounds like a cool, glossy synth-pop anthem about desire, but it was born from a broken relationship, a dead-end band, and a bout of real…
MARILYN MANSON · 1995
Marilyn Manson barely changed a word of Eurythmics' 1983 synth-pop hit. He changed the tempo, the texture and the face singing it, and that …
LYNYRD SKYNYRD · 1974
ALABAMA, USA
A three-chord Southern rock anthem written in 1974 as a pointed reply to Neil Young's "Southern Man" and "Alabama," Lynyrd Skynyrd's signatu…
THE ROLLING STONES · 1968
A swaggering samba-rock confession from the perspective of Satan himself, "Sympathy for the Devil" opened The Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beg…
SOFT CELL · 1981
The synth-pop anthem everyone thinks of as an early-eighties original is actually a forgotten 1964 American soul B-side, rescued by English …
ABBA · 1977
Behind one of the most joyful choruses in pop sits a song about being second choice, a cheerful, almost shameless pitch from someone who kno…
EAGLES · 1972
WINSLOW, ARIZONA, USA
: "Take It Easy," the Eagles' debut single from May 1972, is the song that essentially invented the country-rock sound of the American 1970s…
JOHN DENVER · 1971
WEST VIRGINIA, USA
— In 1971, a folk singer from Roswell, New Mexico named John Denver released a song about a place he had barely visited, written largely by …
FRANZ FERDINAND · 2004
"Take Me Out" sounds like a dancefloor anthem about a night on the town, but it is really a tense little standoff between two people who bot…
BERLIN · 1986
The Oscar-winning love theme from Top Gun wasn't really a Berlin song at all — it was an Italian-disco architect's studio creation that the …
A-HA · 1985
Behind the giddy synth riff, "Take On Me" is a shy, almost desperate plea from someone who knows the odds are against him and asks anyway. I…
JOHNNY PAYCHECK · 1977
The most famous quitting song in history is about a man who never actually quits — he only fantasises about it — and the real reason he want…
LORDE · 2013
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
"Team" sounds like a stadium-sized friendship anthem, but it is really a teenager's quiet manifesto: a love letter to the bored, unglamorous…
ERIC CLAPTON · 1992
: "Tears in Heaven" is the song a guitar god wrote when there was nothing else he could do. Built around the unimaginable loss of his four-y…
THE UNDERTONES · 1978
"Teenage Kicks" is a two-and-a-half-minute hymn to adolescent longing recorded by five working-class kids from Derry, Northern Ireland, at t…
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA · 1976
"Telephone Line" is a heartbreak song about a call nobody picks up. A man lets the phone ring on and on, half certain she's at home and just…
BEYONCÉ · 2024
HOUSTON, TEXAS, USA
"Texas Hold 'Em" sounds like a carefree barn-dance invitation, but it is really a dare built on eight years of grievance: a Houston woman wa…
DIDO · 1998
"Thank You" is not really a love song about happiness. It is a portrait of a genuinely terrible morning in which almost everything goes wron…
BRUNO MARS · 2016
On the surface it is a shopping list of luxuries, but "That's What I Like" is really a love song about generosity: a man who measures his af…
CARLY SIMON · 1971
It sounds like a wedding song and it is actually a quiet horror story about marriage: a woman looks at every married couple she has ever kno…
JANET JACKSON · 1993
MINNEAPOLIS, USA
A superstar known for fierce, militant pop deliberately whispered instead of shouting — turning down the volume to seduce a generation, and …
ED SHEERAN · 2011
LONDON, UK
It sounds like a gentle, fingerpicked love song, but "The A Team" is actually about a young homeless woman trapped in crack cocaine addictio…
SSGT. BARRY SADLER · 1966
The biggest American single of 1966 was not by the Beatles, the Stones or the Supremes. It was a slow, solemn march sung by a wounded Army m…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1969
NEW YORK CITY, USA
A bruised acoustic epic dressed up as folk modesty, "The Boxer" turned Paul Simon's writerly insecurities into one of the most-recorded Amer…
THIN LIZZY · 1976
DUBLIN, IRELAND
It sounds like a triumphant celebration of the lads rolling back into town, but underneath the swagger it's a sharp, slightly uneasy snapsho…
DON HENLEY · 1984
It sounds like a sun-bleached anthem about young love at the beach, but "The Boys of Summer" is really a middle-aged man's lament for a lost…
DOLLY PARTON · 1968
Barely two minutes long, "The Bridge" is a teenage Dolly Parton's ballad about a pregnant girl abandoned by her lover, returning to the spot…
THE CHARLIE DANIELS BAND · 1979
GEORGIA, USA
Beneath the barn-burning fiddle duel sits one of the oldest stories in Western folklore — the deal with the Devil — flipped on its head: a c…
EUROPE · 1986
The most famous synth fanfare in rock was never meant to be a hit single. It was written as a concert opener, and its lyrics are a quiet goo…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1982
On paper it's a love-triangle duet between Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, two superstars squabbling over one woman — but the real story…
THE ANIMALS · 1964
NEW ORLEANS, USA
It sounds like a young man's confession, but for most of its life this was a woman's song — a ballad about being trapped in a New Orleans br…
THE KILLERS · 2017
"The Man" sounds like the cockiest strut in The Killers' catalogue, but it is really Brandon Flowers laughing at the arrogant young rock sta…
VICKI LAWRENCE · 1973
GEORGIA, USA
A comedy sketch actress with no real singing career recorded a Southern Gothic murder ballad her songwriter husband didn't even like — and i…
R.E.M. · 1987
The song millions have dedicated to sweethearts on the radio is, by Michael Stipe's own admission, "incredibly violent" — a cold-blooded por…
CELINE DION · 1993
The song that made Celine Dion a superstar in America was already nearly a decade old, written in Germany by an American singer about her se…
EMINEM · 2000
The most notorious novelty-sounding hit of the year 2000 was actually a late, label-ordered patch job — and underneath the jokes it argues s…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1980
A quiet, devastating ballad about a teenage marriage forced by pregnancy, an economy that takes more than it gives, and the way memory turns…
MEN WITHOUT HATS · 1982
"The Safety Dance" isn't about safety at all — it's a protest anthem written after frontman Ivan Doroschuk was thrown out of a Montreal club…
COLDPLAY · 2002
LIVERPOOL, UK
Coldplay's most famous apology was found, not written: Chris Martin stumbled on an out-of-tune upright piano in a Liverpool studio and had t…
SIMON & GARFUNKEL · 1964
A folk meditation that was almost stillborn, resurrected eighteen months later by a producer's overdub and a country in mourning. What began…
BOB DYLAN · 1964
It sounds like a victory song for the young, but it is really a warning notice served on everyone — written by a 22-year-old who deliberatel…
BRUCE HORNSBY AND THE RANGE · 1986
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA, USA
That gorgeous, gentle piano riff is the sugar coating on a protest song about American racism, welfare-line contempt and the limits of civil…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1987
Beneath its swaggering, finger-snapping cool, this is Michael Jackson playing a part he almost never let himself play on record — a confiden…
ABBA · 1980
A man wrote a breakup song in one late-night burst, and his ex-wife stood at the microphone and sang it to the world. Björn Ulvaeus insists …
NAS · 1994
QUEENSBRIDGE, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY, USA
The title comes from a gangster film's neon promise of easy power, but Nas turns it into something quieter and harder: a young man in a hous…
GORDON LIGHTFOOT · 1976
WHITEFISH POINT, MICHIGAN, USA
A Canadian folk singer read a short magazine item about a freighter that vanished on Lake Superior with 29 men aboard, was quietly furious t…
NANCY SINATRA · 1966
LOS ANGELES, USA
It sounds like a flirty pop confection, but "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" is a cold-eyed kiss-off — a woman who has finished forgiving …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1995
It looks like a stadium-sized protest anthem, but it is really Michael Jackson's raw, wounded howl at every system that judges, brands and d…
ED SHEERAN · 2014
A waltz-time love song dressed in soul-revivalist clothing, "Thinking Out Loud" became the third single from Ed Sheeran's 2014 album x and g…
CHILDISH GAMBINO · 2018
"This Is America" is a song built to trick you: it lures you in with a party beat and viral dance moves, then rips that comfort away with su…
BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS · 1977
The world's gentlest reassurance song was written by a man who had just been shot in his own home. "Three Little Birds" isn't naive cheerful…
BOB MARLEY · 1977
KINGSTON (56 HOPE ROAD), JAMAICA
The sunniest song in the Bob Marley catalogue was written and released by a man who had recently been shot in his own home and was living in…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1982
"Thriller" is a tongue-in-cheek love song disguised as a horror movie — Michael Jackson plays a sweetheart turning monstrous to thrill his d…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1975
A screen door creaks, a harmonica wheezes, and a piano figure climbs the morning air like a prayer that has not yet decided whether to be a …
AC/DC · 1990
A guitar exercise that mutated into an arena anthem, "Thunderstruck" is AC/DC's improbable second act — the sound of a band that should have…
QUEEN · 1976
One of Queen's loudest, rudest rock anthems began as a guitar riff an astronomy student strummed on a Spanish mountainside in 1968, and its …
CYNDI LAUPER · 1984
"Time After Time" is not a dreamy romance written in a moment of bliss. It was a last-minute song, put together under deadline pressure and …
PINK FLOYD · 1973
A meditation on mortality disguised as a rock song, "Time" stands as the conceptual centerpiece of Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon."…
ELTON JOHN · 1971
LOS ANGELES, USA
"Tiny Dancer" is not about a ballerina at all. It is a young English lyricist's love letter to a real Californian woman, the seamstress who …
DAVID GUETTA FT. SIA · 2011
The most defiant vocal of the EDM era was a scratch demo sung by a woman who had just quit being a pop star, written for somebody else entir…
AC/DC · 1975
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
"T.N.T." sounds like pure swaggering nonsense, but it is really Bon Scott's criminal record set to a two-chord stomp — a man who had been wr…
JANET JACKSON · 1997
It sounds like the happiest dance record of 1997, but "Together Again" is actually a song about grief — Janet Jackson wrote it to mourn frie…
SUZANNE VEGA · 1987
NEW YORK CITY, USA
A young woman sits alone in a New York diner, watching the rain and the strangers around her, narrating ordinary nothing-moments in a flat s…
NATALIE IMBRUGLIA · 1997
The song that made Natalie Imbruglia a global star wasn't hers at all — "Torn" was a four-year-old rock song that had already been recorded …
BONNIE TYLER · 1983
This towering power ballad about devastating, all-consuming love was originally written by Jim Steinman as a gothic vampire love song called…
GRATEFUL DEAD · 1987
SAN RAFAEL, CALIFORNIA, USA
The Grateful Dead's only Top 10 hit is not a sunny anthem at all — it is a battered, exhausted list of everything going wrong, and its famou…
BRITNEY SPEARS · 2003
A three-and-a-half-minute spy-movie fever dream built around a surf-guitar sample from Bollywood, "Toxic" arrived in early 2004 as the secon…
SYSTEM OF A DOWN · 2001
"Toxicity" is not a song about drugs or a bad relationship. It is a portrait of a city, and of modern life generally, so crowded, wired and …
THE CLASH · 1979
The Clash's first American Top 30 hit was a heartbroken soul song hidden as a secret track on London Calling — written overnight by Mick Jon…
GRATEFUL DEAD · 1970
NEW ORLEANS, USA
It sounds like a carefree hippie road anthem, but "Truckin'" is really a tired, funny, faintly bruised diary of life on tour — built around …
CYNDI LAUPER · 1986
"True Colors" was not written for Cyndi Lauper, and it did not start as a pride anthem. It began as a songwriter's quiet tribute to his own …
OTIS REDDING · 1966
MEMPHIS, USA
A song written in 1932 by three British and Irish tunesmiths as a polite Tin Pan Alley ballad was hauled, three decades later, into a sweaty…
CHUMBAWAMBA · 1997
LEEDS, UK
The bounciest singalong of 1997 was written by a squat-dwelling anarchist collective from Leeds, and it is not a party song at all — it is a…
THE VAPORS · 1980
Despite decades of playground rumors, "Turning Japanese" is not a euphemism for anything rude — it's a frantic, claustrophobic song about ro…
KANYE WEST · 2016
"Ultralight Beam" is a rap song that is really a church service: a prayer for faith and protection from the most famously self-assured man i…
TONI BRAXTON · 1996
The biggest heartbreak ballad of the 1990s was one Toni Braxton reportedly hated on sight and fought against recording — and its author, Dia…
QUEEN & DAVID BOWIE · 1981
: A near-accidental collaboration between two of rock's most theatrical forces, "Under Pressure" became one of the great improvised masterpi…
RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS · 1991
LOS ANGELES, USA
"Under the Bridge" is usually filed away as a heroin song, but it is really a lonely sober man's love letter to Los Angeles, the only compan…
ALANIS MORISSETTE · 1998
It sounds like a gothic love song from an angel movie, but "Uninvited" is really Alanis Morissette's uneasy letter to fame itself — the terr…
ARETHA FRANKLIN · 1973
It sounds like the gentlest song Aretha Franklin ever sang, but it is really a polite declaration of siege — a woman calmly listing every si…
MARK RONSON FT. BRUNO MARS · 2014
A swaggering, synth-slathered love letter to Minneapolis funk that became the unlikeliest global juggernaut of the streaming era. Beneath it…
MARK RONSON FT. BRUNO MARS · 2014
"Uptown Funk" sounds like a carefree party song, but it is really a painstaking act of musical archaeology: a love letter to the Minneapolis…
KINGS OF LEON · 2008
"Use Somebody" sounds like a stadium love song, but it started as a lonely man staring out of a tour bus window at strangers' lit-up lives, …
OLIVIA RODRIGO · 2023
"Vampire" sounds like a heartbreak song, but it is really about the moment you realise you were not loved so much as used, and that the pers…
U2 · 2004
The biggest rock riff of U2's late career started life as a protest song about an imprisoned Native American activist, and ended up as a swe…
ULTRAVOX · 1980
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
"Vienna" isn't really a love letter to the Austrian capital at all — it's a song about a fleeting affair and a haunted memory, written by a …
DON MCLEAN · 1971
A folk ballad written by a young American songwriter reading a paperback biography of Vincent van Gogh on his back porch in the Hudson Valle…
COLDPLAY · 2008
BARCELONA, SPAIN
The most euphoric-sounding song of 2008 is actually a confession from a toppled king on the morning after his fall, and its title was lifted…
MARC ANTHONY · 2013
The biggest salsa anthem of the 2010s began life as an Algerian raï song, and Marc Anthony released it straight after a very public divorce.…
MADONNA · 1990
HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, USA
"Vogue" sounds like a glossy invitation to strike a pose, but underneath it is a tribute to the Black and Latino queer ballroom scene of Har…
JIMI HENDRIX · 1968
A fifteen-minute studio jam that became the closing statement of the most consequential rock album of the late 1960s, "Voodoo Child" is less…
OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW · 2004
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA, USA
The most sung-along campfire anthem of the twenty-first century is really a half-finished Bob Dylan scrap from 1973 that a seventeen-year-ol…
SHAKIRA · 2010
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
The most-played football anthem of all time is not really Shakira's song at all — its unforgettable chant was lifted from a 1980s Cameroonia…
AVICII · 2013
The biggest dance record of the decade was booed when it premiered — a Swedish DJ played a country-folk song to a field of ravers in Miami a…
GREEN DAY · 2004
It is not an anti-war song and it has nothing to do with 11 September — the title is reportedly a sentence a grieving ten-year-old said thro…
ARCADE FIRE · 2004
MONTREAL, CANADA
The biggest communal singalong of the 2000s is not a celebration at all — it is a warning written by a young man surrounded by funerals, tel…
THE BANGLES · 1986
America's biggest single of 1987 began with a songwriter on a lurching ferry, watching passengers stagger to keep their balance until they l…
RUN-DMC FEAT. AEROSMITH · 1986
NEW YORK CITY, USA
The song that "united rap and rock" was a collision nobody in the room actually wanted — Run-DMC reportedly hated the idea, Aerosmith were b…
RUN-DMC FT. AEROSMITH · 1986
On the surface it is a cheeky tale of a teenage boy's clumsy sexual awakening, but the 1986 version became something far bigger: the record …
RUN-DMC · 1986
The record that knocked down the wall between rock and rap was made by two MCs who reportedly could not stand the lyrics they were rapping, …
MARC COHN · 1991
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, USA
"Walking in Memphis" isn't really a travel song at all — it's the true story of a grieving, creatively blocked Jewish songwriter from Clevel…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1983
Beneath its irresistible groove, this is a furious song about gossip, paranoia, and being talked about behind your back — a young superstar …
SPICE GIRLS · 1996
LONDON, UK
Behind the nonsense-chorus and the giggling is a deceptively pointed manifesto: before a man gets anywhere with you, he has to pass the most…
BON JOVI · 1987
A power ballad disguised as a cowboy song, "Wanted Dead or Alive" is Bon Jovi's most enduring meditation on the loneliness of celebrity, ref…
EDWIN STARR · 1970
DETROIT, MICHIGAN, USA
The most famous protest song in Motown history was never meant to be a single at all — it was an album-track hand-me-down that The Temptatio…
TLC · 1994
Behind one of the smoothest, most singable choruses of the 1990s sits a grim pair of stories, one about a young man killed by the drug trade…
ABBA · 1974
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
On April 6, 1974, four Swedes in glittering platform boots walked onto the stage of the Brighton Dome and rewrote the rules of European pop.…
HARRY STYLES · 2019
"Watermelon Sugar" takes its title from a strange 1968 hippie novel that happened to be lying on a studio table, and it hides a cheeky, grow…
SISTER SLEDGE · 1979
The world's most famous anthem of togetherness was written by two men who had only just met the four sisters who sang it. Nile Rodgers and B…
QUEEN · 1977
: Released in October 1977 as a double A-side with "We Will Rock You," Queen's stadium anthem arrived at the precise moment punk was suppose…
FUN. · 2011
The biggest youth anthem of the 2010s is actually about a bad night: a guilty, half-drunk narrator at a bar trying to patch things up with s…
STARSHIP · 1985
A defiant anthem about saving live rock clubs from the money men, it was written by a committee of hitmakers, polished in a studio until it …
BILLY JOEL · 1989
It sounds like a breathless history quiz, but "We Didn't Start the Fire" is really a 40-year-old father's reply to a young man who thought h…
GIRL IN RED · 2018
It gets filed as a cosy autumn playlist song, but "We Fell in Love in October" is really a small, stubborn act of naming: a teenage girl in …
QUEEN · 1977
: Queen's stomp-stomp-clap anthem was a deliberate experiment in audience participation, written by guitarist Brian May after a transformati…
GUNS N' ROSES · 1987
LOS ANGELES, USA
A snarling postcard from late-Reagan-era Los Angeles, "Welcome to the Jungle" turned a runaway teenager's first night on the Greyhound into …
PET SHOP BOYS · 1985
LONDON, UK
It sounds like a glossy ode to glamorous London nightlife, but "West End Girls" is really a tense, paranoid meditation on class, sex, violen…
LOUIS ARMSTRONG · 1967
The world's gentlest song was written as a deliberate act of defiance in one of America's angriest years, and it was nearly strangled at bir…
SUBLIME · 1996
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, USA
The sunniest sing-along of 1996 is actually a gratitude list written by a man losing a war with heroin — and by the time it reached number o…
LINKIN PARK · 2007
It sounds like a stadium anthem about regret, but "What I've Done" is really the sound of a band firing its own formula: no rapping, no nu-m…
MARVIN GAYE · 1971
The most famous protest song in soul history isn't angry. It is a worried, tender conversation with a family and a country, sparked by a rio…
MARVIN GAYE · 1971
WASHINGTON DC, USA
— In 1971, Marvin Gaye walked into Hitsville U.S.A. and dismantled the Motown hit factory from the inside. "What's Going On" was never suppo…
PRINCE · 1984
The biggest American single of 1984 is a song about a young man realising, mid-argument, that he has become his parents — and Prince strippe…
THE KILLERS · 2006
LAS VEGAS, USA
It sounds like the most triumphant song of 2006, but it is actually a quiet horror story about settling — a woman looking at the man she has…
PIXIES · 1988
The song most people hear as a hymn to madness, alienation and collapsing skyscrapers reportedly started with something much smaller and str…
U2 · 1987
A six-minute act of architectural longing, the opening track of The Joshua Tree begins not with a song but with a sustained sigh of synthesi…
THE BEATLES · 1968
LONDON, UK
The most emotionally weighted guitar song in the Beatles' catalogue began as a writing exercise built on a phrase George Harrison found by o…
THE CLASH · 1977
"White Riot" isn't a song about racial conflict — it's the opposite. Written after Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were caught up in the 1976 …
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
On the surface it is a jealous man demanding to know the name of his rival, but "Who Is It" is really about the far colder discovery underne…
BAHA MEN · 2000
Behind the stadium barking is a Caribbean carnival song about women calling out men who behave badly on a night out. The "dogs" were never p…
LED ZEPPELIN · 1969
: "Whole Lotta Love" is the four-and-a-half-minute thunderclap that announced the 1970s before the decade had legally arrived. With its serr…
GLEN CAMPBELL · 1968
WICHITA, KANSAS, USA
"Wichita Lineman" is an unfinished song about a telephone repairman on the Kansas plains that accidentally became one of the most profound l…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1991
It plays like a love song, but "Will You Be There" is really Michael Jackson at his most spiritually naked — a gospel-soaked prayer asking w…
SCORPIONS · 1990
GORKY PARK, MOSCOW, RUSSIA
A German hard rock band with a reputation for leather, volume and lust wrote the gentlest song of their career after a night in Moscow, and …
PINK FLOYD · 1975
A ballad disguised as a sigh, "Wish You Were Here" is Pink Floyd's most quietly devastating song — a letter to a friend who was no longer qu…
U2 · 1987
A slow-burning anthem built on a single, hypnotic bass figure and a guitar that seems to bleed light, "With or Without You" arrived in 1987 …
EMINEM · 2002
The biggest comeback single of the 2000s is not really a boast about being the best rapper alive — it is an argument that popular culture ne…
JOHN LENNON · 1980
It sounds like a straightforward love song to Yoko Ono, but "Woman" is really an apology from a man who had publicly admitted to being viole…
EVERCLEAR · 2000
Behind its bright, chiming guitars and singalong chorus, "Wonderful" is a child's furious, frightened protest against his parents' divorce, …
ERIC CLAPTON · 1977
A languid, slow-burning ballad written while a guitarist waited for his partner to finish getting ready for a party, "Wonderful Tonight" bec…
OASIS · 1995
: "Wonderwall" is the song that turned Oasis from a Manchester guitar band into a generational shorthand, a four-chord acoustic anthem that …
MISSY ELLIOTT · 2002
On the surface "Work It" is a filthy, funny club record about sex. Underneath, it is a grieving artist's defiant bet on joy and an old-schoo…
VILLAGE PEOPLE · 1978
On its face, "Y.M.C.A." is a cheerful invitation to a young man down on his luck to find a bed, a meal and some friends at the local Christi…
AL STEWART · 1976
The most seductive soft-rock hit of 1976 did not begin as a song about an exotic romance at all. It started life as a portrait of a collapsi…
COLDPLAY · 2000
A four-piece band of unassuming London students stumbled into the new millennium with a song that sounded like sunrise filtered through a be…
THE BEATLES · 1965
LONDON, UK
The most covered song in recorded history is usually heard as a breakup ballad, but its lyric never says who left, or why — and many listene…
VILLAGE PEOPLE · 1978
NEW YORK, USA
A glittering disco anthem born from the cruising culture of late-1970s Manhattan, "Y.M.C.A." smuggled queer code into the heart of mainstrea…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 1995
A ballad about love surviving physical absence, written by R&B singer R. Kelly out of his own grief — and the first song in history to debut…
BON JOVI · 1986
A power-pop missile disguised as a hard rock anthem, "You Give Love a Bad Name" was the song that detonated arena rock's commercial supernov…
BEASTIE BOYS · 1986
The ultimate frat-party anthem was written as a joke about frat-party anthems. Beastie Boys meant it as a sneering parody of dumb, beer-soak…
DAVID ALLAN COE · 1975
The song country fans sing louder than any other is a prank — written by two Chicago folk singers who were quietly teasing the genre, sold t…
MICHAEL JACKSON · 2001
After a decade of songs about scheming women, tabloid persecution and the weight of being the most famous man alive, Michael Jackson's final…
HOT CHOCOLATE · 1975
It sounds like a cheeky disco come-on, but "You Sexy Thing" is really a song of disbelief and gratitude: a man who can hardly accept that he…
AC/DC · 1980
The happiest, cheekiest party song in the AC/DC catalogue was written by a grieving band five months after their singer drank himself to dea…
ELTON JOHN · 1970
PINNER, LONDON, UK
The most famous love song in Elton John's catalogue was written by a teenage lyricist who, by his own account, had barely been in love at al…
JAMES BLUNT · 2005
LONDON, UK
The most famous wedding-and-romance ballad of the 2000s is really about a few seconds on the London Underground, when a man who was, by his …
JOHN TRAVOLTA AND OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN · 1978
The most famous song in Grease was never in Grease the musical: it was written at the last minute by Olivia Newton-John's own producer, and …
DAVID BOWIE · 1972
LONDON, UK
The most famous song about a rock star is not sung by the rock star. It is told by one of his sidemen, in the past tense, with envy curdling…
THE CRANBERRIES · 1994
WARRINGTON, UK
"Zombie" is not a horror song or a generic anti-war anthem. It is a young Irish woman's furious grief over two English boys killed by an IRA…
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