50 Terrible Songs on Great Albums

The Who by Numbers is a dark journey through the mind of Pete Townshend as he battles writer’s block, alcoholism, loneliness, intraband conflict, and a nagging feeling that his best days are behind him. But three songs in, the band puts all this aside for an aggressively silly ditty that compares a woman’s sexual organ to an accordion. “She goes in and out and in and out,” Roger Daltrey sings. “And in and out and in and out/She’s playing all night/And the music’s all right/Mama’s got a squeeze box/Daddy never sleeps at night.” We realize this will be a controversial choice since “Squeeze Box” was a hit all across the planet, and the only song on The Who by Numbers nonfanatical fans will even recognize. But we stand firmly by this. The Who by Numbers is a criminally underrated album that ranks high on the list of the Who’s best work. It’s only marred by this stupid, stupid song. (It’s so dumb that Poison regularly plays it. We rest our case.)

Britney Spears’ 1998 debut album, … Baby One More Time, is a journey through the mind of a heartbroken teenage girl as imagined by a small team of male songwriters and producers, hailing largely from Sweden. It turned Spears into a global a superstar practically overnight thanks to hits like “… Baby One More Time,” “(You Drive Me) Crazy,” and “From the Bottom of a Broken Heart.” The latter was written by Eric Foster White, who also penned “E-Mail My Heart.” It’s another sappy ballad about a young woman waiting by her computer and dial-up modem for her boyfriend to respond to an email. “And all I do is check the screen/To see if you’re OK,” Spears sings. “You don’t answer when I phone/Guess you wanna be left alone/So I’m sending you my heart, my soul/And this is what I’ll say.” We’ll ignore the fact that most teenage girls were chatting on AOL in 1999 and not writing emails, and just focus on the fact that this is a painfully mawkish song.

When Jerry Garcia looked back at “What’s Become of the Baby” in a 1991 interview with Blair Jackson, he had one question: “Why the fuck did everybody let me do that?” The answer is that it was 1968, everyone was stoned out of their minds, and a sparse, psychedelic track where Garcia chants incoherently for eight minutes felt like a good idea. “It was originally baroque,” Garcia said. “I had this melody worked out that had this counterpoint and a nice little rhythm. The original setting I’d worked out was really like one of those song forms from the New York Pro Musica. I just had a desire to make it much weirder than that, and I didn’t know how to do it.… It’s too bad, because it’s an incredible lyric and I feel I threw the song away somewhat.”

The best Creedence songs are two-and-a-half-minute bursts of brilliance without an ounce of fat on them. They came at the height of psychedelia, but their music was the antithesis of that indulgent movement in almost every way. But Creedence veered far from the formula in late 1970 with “Rude Awakening #2,” the final track from their penultimate record, where they’re already showing signs of burnout. (The presence of “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “Hey Tonight” still makes this a great record in our eyes.) “Rude Awakening #2” is an instrumental dripped in psychedelia that meanders for an endless six minutes and 22 seconds. If this was their attempt to be embraced by the cool kids, it failed miserably. Sadly, it also marked the end of guitarist Tom Fogerty’s stint in the band.

In early 1971, Neil Young went to England to perform on the BBC and play a gig at London’s Royal Festival Hall. At the end of the trip, he made the deeply unfortunate decision to head into a studio with the London Symphony Orchestra and record two new songs destined for Harvest, “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World.” They were both sparse tunes that worked quite well on the piano, but suffered greatly by overwrought, wildly unnecessary symphonic arrangements. The track that suffered the most was “There’s a World.” It’s a blight on the otherwise pristine Harvest, and the fact that Young didn’t touch it again in concert until 2017 suggests that he likely knows he screwed it up.

If Michael Jackson had just capped off Thriller with track eight instead of track nine, he would have created one of the most flawless works in music history. But for reasons that are hard to fathom, he tacked “The Lady in My Life” onto the end. And it wasn’t an easy process. “Quincy wasn’t satisfied with my work on that song, even after literally dozens of takes,” Jackson said. “Finally, he took me aside late one session, and told me he wanted me to beg. That’s what he said — he wanted me to go back to the studio and literally beg for it. So I went back in and had them turn off the studio lights, and close the curtain between the studio and the control room, so I wouldn’t feel self-conscious.” He did deliver a strong vocal, but it’s in service of a song that has no business on the same album as “Billie Bean,” “Beat It,” “Human Nature,” Thriller,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

The Beatles took a full month to record Rubber Soul in the fall of 1965. The goal was to finally devote enough time to a single album so that they wouldn’t be forced to pad out the running time with covers or filler. They kept the promise all the way to the final track, “Run for Your Life,” where they included a song John Lennon cobbled together with little thought. “It was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from — this is a very vague connection — from [Elvis Presley’s] ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it — I used to like specific lines from songs — ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ — so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.” Many Beatles fans feel it’s one of the weakest Lennon-McCartney tunes in the Beatles’ entire catalog.

Bruce Sprignsteen signed to Columbia Records as a solo artist in 1972, and legendary A&R man John Hammond saw him as a sensitive singer-songwriter in the same vein as James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Carole King, and other stars of the day. But Springsteen had much more interest in cutting rock songs like “It’s Hard to Be a Saint In the City” and “Growin’ Up” with the earliest incarnation of the E Street Band. This meant his debut LP, Greetings From Asbury Park, was a compromise that teetered between acoustic tracks and E Street rockers. The two weakest songs on the album, without any doubt, are “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel.” But there’s a romantic spark to “Mary Queen of Arkansas” that prevents the song from falling totally flat. We can offer no such praise for “The Angel.” It’s a mushy piano ballad about a biker with groan-inducing lyrics like “Wieldin’ love as a lethal weapon/On his way to hubcap heaven.” The only two live performances since 1973 took place at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1996 and Buffalo, New York’s HSBC Arena in 2009, when Springsteen played Greetings straight through. Odds are quite high he’ll never do it again. It’s up in hubcap heaven now.

In her 2014 Rolling Stone cover story, Taylor Swift said she had major beef with a fellow pop star who tried to “sabotage an entire arena tour” by poaching some of her dancers. “For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not,” she said. “She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’” (It took about 16 seconds for internet sleuths to figure out she was talking about Katy Perry.) This inspired “Bad Blood,” on which Swift rails against her enemy (“You say sorry just for show”), but the song is limp and repetitive. And when Swift and Perry made peace, the whole thing just seemed silly. It did, however, lead to a glorious moment on the Eras Tour when Perry filmed herself singing along to the song at a stadium in Sydney. Maybe that’s a sign it’s time to permanently retire the song.

There’s really no such thing as a bad Smiths song, but they came pretty close with “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” on their final LP, Strangeways Here We Come. (A vocal contingent of fans felt the album was a big letdown after The Queen Is Dead, but nearly any album would feel that way following that staggering achievement.) “Paint a Vulgar Picture” is a screed against record companies capitalizing on the premature deaths of young stars. “At the record company meeting,” Morrissey sings, “on their hands at last!/A dead star/But they cannot taint you in my eyes.” The rant plods along for five and a half minutes, never coming close to the highs of “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Death of a Disco Dancer,” “Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loved Me,” or any of the other songs on the album. Morrissey wasn’t wrong to feel queasy about the way labels profited from the deaths of Ian Curtis, Marc Bolan, and other tragic figures. But this should have remained a rant in his diary. It didn’t need to be a song. 

John Lennon’s heart was in the right place when he wrote “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” to mock a young, wealthy American who hunted for tigers while he was staying at the Maharishi’s meditation camp in India. But it’s a simplistic nursery rhyme that repeats the line “Hey, Bungalow Bill/What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?” over and over and over, with yelps from Yoko Ono. It’s mildly amusing on first listen, but it grows deeply annoying very quickly. There are other weak moments on the White Album, including “Wild Honey Pie,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Good Night,” not to mention the sound collage “Revolution 9,” but “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” is the one that has us reaching for the skip button the fastest.

Despite his frequent assertions to the contrary over the years, the songs on Blood on the Tracks reflect the pain Bob Dylan felt while separated from his first wife, Sara Lownds. It’s the reason why so many people have connected to “Shelter From the Storm,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” and “Simple Twist of Fate” over the years. But midway through the album, the narrative pauses for nine interminable minutes of “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.” It’s a Western saga about the Jack of Hearts, Lily, Rosemary, Big Jim, and the Hanging Judge that’s practically impossible to follow. Many listeners simply skip past it. (The stripped-down version on 2018’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks is far superior.) The only time Dylan even attempted it live was the final show of the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, but no tape survives. That’s probably for the best. (It’s still very easy to argue that Blood on the Tracks is Dylan’s best album, but it would be even better if he’d included “Up to Me” and dumped “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”)

If an AI was asked to write a Bruce Springsteen song, it would likely come up with something fairly close to “Factory.” As the title suggests, it’s about the pain and indignity of working at a factory, and was inspired by the struggles of his father. “Early in the morning, factory whistle blows,” Springsteen sings. “Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes/Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light.” The song was originally conceived as “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” with far better lyrics, but Springsteen decided to take it in a different direction during the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions. To be fair, “Factory” is far from an outright embarrassment. But it is the worst song on the otherwise flawless Darkness on the Edge of Town by miles. Making matters worse, he cut “Because the Night,” “Fire,” “The Promise,” and many other fantastic songs, but made room for “Factory.” It was an unfortunate decision. It seems as if Springsteen is aware of this — he’s played it live fewer times than any other song on the album.

Randy Meisner was a man of many talents. He was a gifted bassist, and his achingly tender voice was a critical part of the harmony blend that gave the Eagles such a distinct sound. His lead vocals on “Take It to the Limit” are simply magnificent, and all attempts to pull off that song without him have fallen flat. But he simply couldn’t compete as a songwriter in a band with Don Henley, Glen Frey, and Joe Walsh. And these guys were operating at their absolute peak when Hotel California came around. This was Meisner’s last album with the group, and they included his country-rock tune “Try and Love Again” on the second side. It’s the only dud on the otherwise perfect album. Vince Gill did his best with it when the remaining Eagles played Hotel California straight through about five years back, but it was a bathroom break for many between “Pretty Maids All in a Row” and “The Last Resort.”

When Neil Young finally released Homegrown in 2020 following a 46-year delay, fans had many questions: Why did he hold back such a brilliant collection of songs all these years? How would such an intense, personal LP have been greeted by the public back in 1974? And what the hell is up with that song “Florida”? The latter question refers to a bizarre, spoken-word track where a deeply stoned Young tells a rambling story about witnessing an out-of-control hang glider kill a couple on the ground, leaving an orphaned baby by their side. The only musical accompaniment is the sound of Young and guitarist Ben Keith rubbing piano strings and the rims of wine glasses. It’s a symbolic story about the dissolution of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, and custody questions that linger over their child Zeke. It’s also the dream referenced in the opening lyrics of the next song, “Kansas.” But that doesn’t mean it’s an enjoyable listen. There’s absolutely no reason to hear it more than once.

The Stooges practically invented punk rock on their 1969 debut LP with songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “No Fun,” and “1969” that have become standards of the genre. But just three songs into the LP, they veer wildly off course with the 10-minute “We Will Fall.” Built around producer John Cale’s viola and a monk-like chant by bassist Dave Alexander, it sounds more like a discarded Velvet Underground studio jam than anything in the Stooges’ catalog. “There’s usually one song on each of my albums that has people going, ‘When he fucks up, he fucks up big time. This is absolutely unlistenable, pretentious crap, cough cough,’” Iggy Pop said years later. “That was the one on my first album.” For most Stooges fans, it’s merely the track after “I Wanna Be Your Dog” that you skip to reach “No Fun.” When the group reunited in the 2000s, they played Fun House and Raw Power straight through at various points. They never attempted their first album since it would have meant a live performance of “We Will Fall,” and that simply wasn’t going to happen.

If anyone thinks “Good Morning Good Morning” isn’t the clear low point of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they should take a listen to John Lennon himself. “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought,” he told David Sheff in 1980. “The ‘Good morning, good morning’ was from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it came over, and then I wrote the song.” Lennon did indeed nick the hook from a long-running Kellogg’s commercial. He turned it into something slightly more profound, but it’s still quite clearly something Lennon tossed off with little thought. George Martin went to his grave regretting the decision not to include “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Sgt. Pepper because it had already been released as a single. If they’d only dumped “Good Morning, Good Morning” to make room for it, it would be a much stronger record. (And if you love the song, it’s likely because you’ve heard it a million times and can’t imagine Sgt. Pepper without it. Listen to the song in isolation and see what you think.)

Pete Townshend conceived of the Who’s 1967 LP The Who Sell Out as an imaginary broadcast from a pirate-radio ship, complete with fake commercials for baked beaks and deodorant. It’s a clever concept that mostly works, but not every song lives up to the promise of “Tattoo,” “I Can See for Miles,” “Armenia in the Sky,” and “I Can’t Reach Out.” The clear low point is “Silas Stingy,” which was penned by bassist John Entwistle. It’s basically a nursery rhyme about a painfully cheap old man who keeps all of his money in a black box. Half the song is just a repeat of “Money, money, money bags/There goes mingy Stingy.” It’s annoying the first time you hear it, and unbearable the 10th time you hear it. It’s not just the worst song on The Who Sell Out, but one of the single worst songs the Who ever released. And that includes 1980s coked-out fiascos like “Did You Steal My Money?” 

The Mike Love of today is a proud MAGA Republican who spent New Year’s Eve rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The Mike Love of 1971 was significantly less politically inclined, but eager to jump on the anti-war bandwagon and find a way for the Beach Boys to be relevant in the era of Kent State and the Weather Underground. That’s why he took Leiber and Stoller’s 1954 song “Riot in Cell Block Number 9” and recast it as “Student Demonstration Time,” on Surf’s Up, writing lyrics about campus activism in response to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. “America was stunned on May 4, 1970/When rally turned to riot up at Kent State University,” he wrote. “They said the students scared the Guard/Though the troops were battle dressed/Four martyrs earned a new degree/The bachelor of bullets.” This reads like some sort of parody, but those are the actual lyrics. Even 54 years later, it’s hard to listen to the song without cringing. And it mars a truly excellent Beach Boys album.

During the creation of their ambitious 1968 album, Bookends, Art Garfunkel visited the United Home for Aged Hebrews in New Rochelle, New York, and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. The idea was to create a sound collage of senior citizens talking about their lives that would lead up to “Old Friends,” a poignant tune that Paul Simon wrote, where he imagined the two of them “sharing a park bench quietly” at age 70. This result was a painfully depressing two minutes and nine seconds of nursing-home residents sharing things like, “God forgive me, but an old person without money is pathetic,” and, “I couldn’t get younger, I have to be an old man.” It brings the album to a dead stop and reminds each and every listener of the inevitably of death. As the years passed, and the odds that any of these people were still alive slipped down to zero, the track grew even more maudlin.

As the old saying goes, cocaine is one hell of a drug. Black Sabbath were snorting it practically by the gallon when they recorded Vol. 4 at L.A.’s Record Plant in 1972. One particularly insane night, after hours in the studio, they ripped off their clothes and began dancing around. A cross that guitarist Tony Iommi wore around his neck brushed against his guitar string, making a distinct sound. “Everybody then danced around the guitar, hitting it,” Iommi wrote in his memoir, Iron Man. “I always put so much work in every song, putting all the different changes in and everything, and we had a track that came about accidentally because a couple of stone people were hitting my guitar.” This was surely good for a laugh in the studio, but featuring the track on Vol. 4 alongside legit songs like “Changes” and “Snowblind” is a decision only four guys blind to logic and reason due to “snow” would make.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin originally planned on cutting their 1973 double LP, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, at the same studio in Jamaica where the Rolling Stones recorded Goat’s Head Soup earlier that year. “It was not a good vibe,” Taupin told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I remember a lot of barbed wire around the studio and armed guards. We spent a lot of time congregating around the pool area of the hotel, feeling there was safety in numbers.” They eventually retreated back to the safer confines of the Château d’Hérouville in France and finished the album in a matter of weeks. The only trace of their Jamaica adventures is found in the deeply unfortunate song “Jamaica Jerk-Off,” where John delivers lines like “We’re all happy in Jamaica/Do Jamaica jerk-off that way” with a strong hint of an island accent. It has no place on the same album as true masterpieces like “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Sweet Painted Lady,” and “Harmony.” John has never once played it live, and Taupin claims to have no memory of even writing it. That’s probably for the best.

Countless Guns N’ Roses fans have come across the final track on Use Your Illusion II over the years and had the same question: “What in God’s holy name is this insane industrial song ‘My World,’ where Axl Rose is rapping?” Founding guitarist Izzy Stradlin had the same question, even though he plays on the album and co-wrote many of the songs. “I didn’t even know it was on it until it came out,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. “I gave it a listen and thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’” The answer is a song that Rose created in just three hours while tripping on mushrooms. “You want to step into my world?” he snarls. “It’s a socio-psychotic state of bliss/You’ve been delayed in the real world/How many times have you hit and missed?” The song is so horrifically, ludicrously awful that it needs to be heard to be believed. And decisions like “My World” played a role in Stradlin leaving the band midway through the Use Your Illusion tour. He had been living in Axl’s world for too long and was ready to get out.

Pink Floyd’s 1971 LP Meddle is bookended by two prog-rock masterpieces: “One of These Days” and “Echos.” The experimental tracks in the middle fail to reach those highs, but “Fearless,” “A Pillow Full of Winds,” and “St. Tropez” are beloved by Floyd aficionados and have aged extremely well. The same cannot be said for “Seamus.” The novelty blues tune features Steve Marriot’s border collie Seamus howling for two interminable minutes, and was basically included as a joke. But it wasn’t funny in 1971, and it’s definitely not funny now. It’s just the ridiculous song everyone skips past so they can hear “Echoes,” and a strong candidate for the worst song in the entire Pink Floyd catalog. (Sorry, Seamus. We’re sure you were a good boy.)

Police guitarist Andy Summers had an extremely overbearing mother. “I was sort of ‘the golden child,’” he said, “and there I was, sort of fulfilling all of her dreams by being this pop star in the Police. I got a certain amount of pressure from her.” It was certainly a difficult situation, and he wrote the manic “Mother” to vent his frustration, utilizing an unnerving 7/8 time signature, and handling the vocals himself. “Well every girl that I go out with/Becomes my mother in the end,” he wails. “Oh, oh, mother/Oh, mother dear, please listen/And don’t devour me.” These are the kinds of things you say to a therapist. You don’t include them on the Police’s final album alongside “King of Pain,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Murder by Numbers,” and other classics. It’s understandable that Sting felt the need to appease his guitarist by giving him one song on the album, but it didn’t have to be this embarrassing fiasco.