50 STORIES · TAGGED
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
METALLICA · 1991
A lullaby turned inside out, "Enter Sandman" was the moment Metallica stopped belonging to the underground and started belonging to everyone…
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…
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 — …
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
OASIS · 1995
: "Wonderwall" is the song that turned Oasis from a Manchester guitar band into a generational shorthand, a four-chord acoustic anthem that …
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…