61 / 61 ARTICLES
BILL WITHERS · 1971
— In 1971, a 32-year-old factory worker named Bill Withers, still assembling toilet seats for Boeing 747s, walked into a Los Angeles studio …
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…
SEX PISTOLS · 1976
— 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…
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…
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…
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…
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN · 1984
: Bruce Springsteen's 1984 anthem is one of the most misread songs in American popular music — a bleak portrait of a Vietnam veteran abandon…
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…
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"…
EAGLES · 1973
: "Desperado" is a piano ballad masquerading as a cowboy song — a meditation on emotional isolation written by two young Californians who ba…
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…
NINA SIMONE · 1965
"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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
EAGLES · 1976
: "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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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
: In 1972, a former Navy mechanic and aircraft-toilet assembler named Bill Withers sat at a Wurlitzer piano in Los Angeles and channeled the…
DUA LIPA · 2020
— 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…
THE CLASH · 1979
— 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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
ARETHA FRANKLIN · 1967
In 1967, Aretha Franklin took a swaggering Otis Redding blues number about a tired husband begging for some appreciation when he got home, a…
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…
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…
OTIS REDDING · 1968
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…
NIRVANA · 1991
: A scuffed, sarcastic anthem written almost as a joke became the song that detonated mainstream rock and dragged underground culture into t…
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…
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…
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…
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…
BEN E. KING · 1961
— In the spring of 1961, a 22-year-old singer named Benjamin Earl Nelson — better known as Ben E. King — walked into a Manhattan studio to r…
STEVIE WONDER · 1972
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 …
LYNYRD SKYNYRD · 1974
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…
EAGLES · 1972
: "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
— 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 …
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
QUEEN · 1977
: Queen's stomp-stomp-clap anthem was a deliberate experiment in audience participation, written by guitarist Brian May after a transformati…
MARVIN GAYE · 1971
— 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…
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…
OASIS · 1995
: "Wonderwall" is the song that turned Oasis from a Manchester guitar band into a generational shorthand, a four-chord acoustic anthem that …
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…
No songs match these filters.