63 STORIES · TAGGED
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 BEATLES · 1967
LIVERPOOL, UK
A hallucinatory dispatch from John Lennon's Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever" turned a Salvation Army orphanage garden into a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…