The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

The keynote from Bowie’s 1971 album, Hunky Dory, “Changes” challenged rock audiences to “turn and face the strange.” But the song originally stalled on the charts in both Britain and the United States, and it didn’t really take off until after the international success of 1972’s Ziggy Stardust. Eventually, Bowie fans adopted it as the theme song for the man who’d already given them Hippie Bowie, Mod Bowie, and Bluesy Bowie. As it turned out, he had barely begun to show the world his wardrobe of disguises. The poignant sax solo at the end is played by Bowie himself.

Funnily enough, Steven Tyler was just a teenager when he wrote the lyrics “Every time when I look in the mirror/All these lines on my face getting clearer/The past is gone.” Though he’d started to write the music to what would become Aerosmith’s breakthrough hit in his adolescence, he never expected much from it. “It was just this little thing I was playing, and I never dreamed it would end up as a real song or anything,” he said later. But the inspirational, colossal power ballad, the first recording in which Tyler unleashed his piercing falsetto, was first a local hit in Boston and then nationally in 1976.

Not many biographers inspire their subjects to create hit singles. According to Gaye biographer David Ritz, the writer was visiting Gaye in Belgium in April 1982 to continue writing the story of his life, but he found the R&B legend blocked creatively and obsessed with pornography. “I suggested that Marvin needed sexual healing,” Ritz later wrote. Gaye took it from there. His first post-Motown single was built on a beat from a Roland TR-808 drum machine (the device’s first appearance on a mainstream pop hit), sinuous layers of synthesizers, and Gaye’s own incomparable voice, both seductive and spiritual, combining the physical and the transcendent.

The opening riff of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” still sounds eerie nearly 50 years after its release, like a submarine’s sonar system gone haywire. Producer Willie Mitchell was responsible for pulling out the electric timbales, which was the source of that uncanny opening melody; “When I heard it,” songwriter Don Bryant remembered, “it blew my mind.” The title phrase was provided by Peebles, who was frustrated one night by a sudden burst of precipitation, and the trusty Hi Records band, which also played on Al Green’s many hits, contributed the steamrolling, organ-heavy, Southern soul instrumental. Peebles’ dramatic vocal delivery turns a lonely night into an epic struggle with nature.

The Godfather of Soul started a new decade with a brand new band: the J.B.’s, featuring drummer Jabo Starks and the Collins brothers, Bootsy and Catfish. He also had a stripped-down new sound, streamlining Sixties soul till there was little more left than an extended funky vamp that dared you to keep up, fired by a call-and-response between Brown and his trusted sidekick, Bobby Byrd. Engineer Ron Lenhoff earned a co-writing credit the hard way: He got out of bed and drove five hours to Nashville at Brown’s urgent request. And as this track demonstrates, Brown could be very persuasive.

Cline wasn’t impressed when her husband, Charlie Dick, brought home a demo by a 28-year-old rookie Nashville songwriter named Willie Nelson. Told that the song’s title was “Crazy,” she responded, “It sure is.” But producer Owen Bradley helped Cline make the song her own with a lush arrangement and understated backing vocals from gospel quartet the Jordanaires. “Crazy” would, years later, help set the stage for a sophisticated new phase of the C&W sound known as “countrypolitan,” although Cline herself wouldn’t be around to shape it: She died in a plane crash less than two years later.

Polly Harvey began writing the title track to her second album in a crap London flat she shared with her bandmates, “sitting on my bed in my damp front room by the gas heater,” as she later recalled. Its power was revealed halfway around the world, when the trio entered Pachyderm Recording Studio in Minnesota with producer Steve Albini, whose mix highlighted the contrast between Harvey’s simmering verses and sledgehammer chorus. Oddly, at least one young couple found this masterpiece of possessive rage … romantic? “I actually played at my brother’s wedding,” Harvey told GQ. “The song that they requested for me to play was ‘Rid of Me.’”

Keith Richards initially wrote this acoustic ballad about leaving his wife, Anita, and newborn son Marlon as the Stones prepared for their first American tour in three years. Stones sidekick Ian Stewart didn’t want to play the minor chords required, so Memphis maverick Jim Dickinson filled in on upright piano at the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, recording session. “It was one of those magical moments when things come together,” Richards wrote of the song. “Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be ‘couldn’t drag me away.’”

After building a reputation as wild shock rappers, Houston’s Geto Boys dialed back the gore and toyed with something equally twisted but more real, showing the paranoia that lurked beneath their hard exteriors. Writer-producer Scarface rapped about looking over his back and checking his telephone for taps over a dusky Isaac Hayes sample that added a funky depth to the dread. “They lost the extremism and played it more to the middle, with chilling deadpan perfection,” Questlove wrote in his 2012 list of the 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time. “As a result, this is an awesome complex display of paranoia, and somehow manages to add a third dimension — which of course humanizes them in the end.”

Bobbie Gentry was only 24 when she sent Capitol Records her demo of “Ode to Billie Joe” in early 1967, hoping an established star like Lou Rawls might record it. By August of that year, however, the Mississippi-born singer-songwriter had a Number One with the Delta noir ballad that insisted on its own alluringly ambiguous narrative. Gentry has remained mum on the song’s mystery ever since. As to what exactly Billie Joe McAllister and the song’s narrator dropped off the Tallahatchie Bridge? “I left it open so the listener could draw his own conclusion,” she said.

With this song, the long-standing battle between young Black men and the LAPD was placed out in the open for white America to see and hear. The confrontational L.A. crew’s label, Priority Records, received a bulletin from the FBI denouncing the song for encouraging “violence against and disrespect for the law-enforcement officer”; the promoter who booked the group’s next tour imposed a contract that the band would be fined $25,000 if it ever played the song live. But as MC Ren told Arsenio Hall, the song was more about venting than threatening: “Once in everybody’s lifetime, they get harassed by the police for no reason, and everybody wants to say it, but they can’t say it on the spot ’cause something will happen to ’em.”

As its name suggests, Bowie’s ethereal “Space Oddity” was heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather than the actual 1969 moon landing that closely coincided with its release. “It was picked up by the British television, and used as the background music for the landing itself,” Bowie said. “I’m sure they really weren’t listening to the lyric at all. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to juxtapose against a moon landing.” Crucially, it became Bowie’s first U.S. hit, offering just a glimpse of the ever-evolving star he would become.

Blissed out from his appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Hendrix conjured this brief reverie in a London session, saying the gossamer ballad was “like one of those beautiful girls that come around sometimes.” His guitar solo emerges from a Leslie speaker cabinet, a piece of equipment originally designed for organs, which accounts for the oscillating sound, and a glockenspiel completes the mood. It’s a performance that stuns guitarists still, as Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine noted: “He seamlessly weaves chords and single-note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music books.”

“The first rap record,” according to Tony Glover, a buddy of Dylan’s from the early Sixties Minneapolis folk scene. “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business,’ and some of the scat songs of the Forties,” Dylan said. The opening lines riffed on an old Woody Guthrie tune, the first gust in a monsoon of imagery that opened Dylan’s folk-rock classic Bringing It All Back Home, and set a whole new course for what a rock & roll song could say. John Lennon once said of the track that it was so captivating it made him wonder how he could ever compete.

The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section copied the note-for-note introduction to this Staple Singers pop-funk smash from the 1969 reggae instrumental “Liquidator,” by the Harry J. All Stars. “We took ‘The Liquidator’ and rearranged the pattern a bit,” as bassist David Hood put it. But the star of the song, which teased sexual, divine, and political deliverance, was vocalist Mavis Staples, who improvised some of the lyrics on the spot (one take of the song reportedly lasted a full 30 minutes). “That music was so good to me,” Staples recalled years later. “I fell right into it.”

“I wanted to write the type of rock song that I would go out and buy,” said Jackson, “but also something totally different from the rock music I was hearing on Top 40 radio.” Producer Quincy Jones wanted Jackson to write something like the Knack’s “My Sharona.” The result was a throbbing dance single with West Side Story gang-war imagery and a fingers-flying guitar solo provided by Eddie Van Halen. “I’m not gonna sit here and tell you what to play,” Jones instructed Van Halen. “The reason you’re here is because of what you do play.”

Originally recorded by one of Prince’s side projects, the Family, the tune became a striking Number One in 1990 when O’Connor transformed it into a universal declaration of loss. “As far as I’m concerned,” O’Connor would later say, “it’s my song.” The video focused on her face for three minutes until she shed a lone tear. For O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U” has become an eternal tribute to her mother, whom she lost as a teenager: “I was always — and am always — singing to my mother,” she wrote of the song. “Every time I perform it, I feel … that I’m talking with her again.”

Wonder originally wrote and recorded “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” while he was finishing his 1972 LP, Music of My Mind, but he decided to hang on to it until his next album, Talking Book, where it became the album’s second Number One, following “Superstition.” The song originated from a band rehearsal and was recorded that same night at Electric Lady Studios. “The feeling of the melody is happy, because when I wrote it I was in New York in late spring, early summer,” Wonder later said. “Good things were happening.”

Paul Simon was just 21 years old when he took his guitar into his Queens, New York, bathroom, as he often did, and shut the lights off. “I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run,” he said in 1984. “I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me. And I’d play. In the dark. ‘Hello darkness my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again.’” Simon and Garfunkel’s original acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence” was a commercial dud, but when producer Tom Wilson added electric instrumentation (without the duo’s knowledge), it became a folk-rock smash. By the time “Sounds of Silence” was featured in The Graduate, it was already a Sixties touchstone.

This rare collaboration between Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark turned into what is often regarded as the first psychedelic rock song. It was inspired in part by both John Coltrane and the band’s first time together on an airplane, a flight to England in 1965. “Gene asked, ‘How high do you think that plane was flying?’” McGuinn recalled years later. “I thought about seven miles, but the Beatles had a song called ‘Eight Days a Week,’ so we changed it to ‘Eight Miles High’ because we thought that would be cooler.” Several radio stations picked up on the song’s trippy double meaning and banned it.

Reed was asked to write songs for a musical based on the novel A Walk on the Wild Side. The show never happened, but Reed kept the title. “I thought it would be fun to introduce people you see at parties but don’t dare approach,” he said. The Mick Ronson/David Bowie-produced result was an unsentimental look back at the characters from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, complete with references to transgender people, oral sex, and amphetamines — shocking stuff for the radio in 1972. “In novels, this would be considered nothing,” he told Rolling Stone years later. “It’s not a scary song — The Brothers Karamazov is scarier than that song.”

Roger Waters was suffering from stomach cramps before a gig in Philadelphia when a doctor injected him with tranquilizers. “He gave me a shot, and to this day I don’t know what it was,” the bassist recalled in 2010. “But it’s not something I would ever recommend giving to a human being. It came out of a dart that felt like it was used to tranquilize an elephant.” From that experience came The Wall epic “Comfortably Numb,” one of the saddest drug songs ever, featuring not just one, but two mind-melting solos from David Gilmour. “I’m perfectly happy to puzzle the hell out of people who try to work out how it was done,” he said.

Written and painstakingly recorded with brother-producer Finneas at his house, the racing beat, whispery stacked harmonies, crackling finger snaps, and ground-quaking bass of Eilish’s biggest hit to date are both menacing and whimsical (the Wizards of Waverly Place theme was an inspiration). Eilish’s lyrics reduce some swaggering male to a mere simp, and she delivers them with IDGAF insouciance. “I’m actually so shocked and happy that people like it the way that it is,” Eilish told Rolling Stone. “The thing we were most worried about was the chorus, and having it have no hook.”

Eddie Van Halen, then best known for lightning-fast shredding, had the stabbing, anthemic synth riff mapped out since at least 1982, allegedly inspired by a riff from Hall and Oates’ “Kiss on My List.” Producer Ted Templeman wasn’t crazy about “Jump.” (“When Van Halen uses keyboards,” he said, “they should sound nasty.”) Nor was singer David Lee Roth (tensions between Roth and Eddie led to Roth departing the band in 1985), but that didn’t stop Diamond Dave from belting it to Number One, making “Jump” the only chart topper the band ever achieved.

Convinced that the band’s previous two singles had flopped because they were too pristine, the Kinks went into the studio in the summer of 1964 to record this deliberately raw rave-up, written by Ray Davies on the piano in his parents’ living room. But the original recording still felt too shiny, and the band had to borrow £200 to cover the cost of another session. Seventeen-year-old guitarist Dave Davies took a razor to the speaker cone on his amp to get the desired dirty sound for that immortal, blistering riff. “The song came out of a working-class environment,” Dave recalled. “People fighting for something.”

Like many great singing groups, this smooth quartet honed their distinct harmonies in the Black church. Tenor Terry “Buzzy” Johnson struggled to devise a novel arrangement that could make crooner Ben Selvin’s 1934 hit engaging to modern audiences, until the otherworldly echo, piano plink, and coaxing doo-bop-sh-bops that would set the Flamingos’ version apart came to him in a dream. The other members weren’t exactly thrilled when he called them over at four in the morning to share his revelation, but the classic recording proved worth losing a little sleep over.

R.E.M.’s first single was a pure band creation: “I wrote the verse and B section late one night while sitting alone downstairs in an Athens record store, while a party was going on upstairs,” recalled bassist Mike Mills. “Peter wrote the chorus and bridge, and Michael supplied the melody and lyrics.” They released a raw, fast version on a local indie label in 1981, and rerecorded it for 1983’s epochal Murmur, with a richer melody and tighter rhythm — “like Motown,” Buck recalled. Stipe mumbled his lyrics because he hadn’t finished writing them when it was time to record.

The centerpiece and title track of Television’s debut album is a guitar epic full of spooky rapture and urban paranoia. The twin guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd stretch out for 10 minutes, closer in style to the Grateful Dead than the Ramones, but with a sleek, street-smart edge, their guitar lines dodging and weaving like midtown traffic. “I would play until something happened,” Verlaine said of his style. “That comes from jazz, or even the Doors, or the Five Live Yardbirds album — that kinda rave-up dynamics.”

Until 1963, Nina Simone hadn’t been much of a fan of protest songs, calling them “simple and unimaginative.” Then a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four Black children, and NAACP official Medgar Evers was murdered, and a song “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down,” she said. Driven by Simone’s effervescent piano and vivacious delivery, “Mississippi Goddam” feels jaunty — “a show tune … but the show hasn’t been written for it yet,” she sang. Its speedy sprightliness is harried, as if she was channeling the way that so many at the time were shocked by events and demanding change.