The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Prine’s most well-known song may be about, what he described as, “a middle-aged woman who feels older than she is,” but the drudgery and despair depicted in “Angel From Montgomery” is universal, delivered by Prine with characteristic warmth and empathy. “She wanted to get out of her house and her marriage and everything,” Prine said. “She just wanted an angel to come to take her away from all this.” Bonnie Raitt made the song her own with a majestic 1974 version, but even stripped bare of any music at all, Prine’s blunt words would pack a wallop.

If “Time of the Season” did nothing more than introduce the term “Who’s your daddy?” into the cultural lexicon, it would be a landmark achievement. But the 1968 Zombies single is also one of the defining songs of the psychedelic era — the closing track on the band’s 1968 classic Odessey and Oracle. In the studio, the love didn’t flow as freely as it did on the record, including a nasty fight between frontman Colin Blunstone and songwriter-keyboardist Rod Argent. “It ended up with us shouting at each other,” Blunstone said in 2015. “And there I am singing ‘It’s the time of the season for loving …’”

Roxy Music’s debut single didn’t have a chorus, and Bryan Ferry didn’t sing the title until the song’s final words. But the enormously original U.K. glam-rock band was never big on formula. “My head was swimming with lots of different, contrasting types of music,” said Ferry. His pop-eyed lyrics fast-forwarded through a travelogue of glamour (Baby Jane Holzer, Rio, “midnight-blue casino floors”), while Brian Eno coaxed weird sounds from his VCS3 synthesizer. For the motorcycle that revs in the background, the band borrowed a friend’s bike and recorded it live late at night outside the studio.

When RCA Records signed “hillbilly cat” Presley, the label expected more songs like his rockabilly hits from Sun Records. Instead, for his first RCA single, Presley recorded this gloomy, downtempo number, co-written by Mae Boren Axton, his former publicist, and inspired by a Miami Herald report of a suicide note that consisted solely of the line “I walk a lonely street.” But what Sun Records founder Sam Phillips called “a morbid mess” went on to become Presley’s first Number One hit and million-selling single.

BTS’ first-ever U.S. Number One, as well as their first full English-language song, “Dynamite” was a landmark, hegemony-shattering moment for the world-conquering South Korean group. Their intertwined vocal talent, led by youthful standout Jung Kook, put over the track — which was co-written by British producer-songwriter Dave Stewart (not the one from Eurythmics) and Jessica Agombar. Stewart told Rolling Stone that Columbia Records had been looking for an English-language crossover hit for BTS: “It had to have tempo, be exciting.… one thing I’m good at is writing to brief.”

For Lou Adler, who produced it, King’s Tapestry was “the Love Story of the record industry. It hit a nerve.” But unlike that film’s gauzy view of romance, King’s biggest hit, “It’s Too Late,” was a forthright, adult song about divorce, a heretofore new topic for pop — and King gave a vocal performance that was as resolutely unsentimental but still as full of warmth as her lyrics. Its Number One status was revelatory at the time, a chart-topping single about the end of a relationship in which a woman is clearly doing the breaking up.

“‘It sounds like a big iron bloke walking about,’” bassist Geezer Butler recalled Ozzy Osbourne saying when he first heard Tony Iommi play the single most iconic guitar riff in metal history. That description was all Butler needed to inspire a tale of literal heavy metal: a man “turned to steel, in a great magnetic field” — apparently totally unrelated to the already-extant Marvel character. Few songs encapsulate an entire genre the way this one does, thanks mainly to Iommi’s plodding doom-blues motif, which Osbourne borrows exactly for his vocal line.

Few songs encapsulated the smooth-sailing style that would come to be called yacht rock as much as the Doobies’ Grammy-sweeping hit. The falsetto harmonies, syncopated Michael McDonald keyboard, and lovelorn lyrics (about “two people who see this same thing in their past very differently,” McDonald said) were textbook yacht. But the song didn’t come easy: The Doobies attempted it at least 30 times in the studio, driving everyone nuts, even its singer. “I was like, ‘I hate this fucking song,’” McDonald recalls. “The band was completely disgusted by that point.”

Berry wrote “Promised Land” in prison, where he was serving a sentence for taking a teenage girl across state lines, a charge he felt was racially motivated. When he arrived at Chess Records for his first session after getting out, the first thing he recorded was “Promised Land,” an American travelogue set to a hot riff that mapped out the same course that the civil rights protesters known as the the Freedom Riders had taken as they tried to integrate Southern bus stations in 1961 — including cities like Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, where the riders were attacked by violent mobs.

Monkeemania peaked in late 1966 and early 1967 when this Neil Diamond-penned love song stayed at Number One for seven consecutive weeks. The vocals were laid down by Micky Dolenz after a long day on the set of the Monkees TV series; he later recalled that his life at the time was such a blur of filming and recording that he has no memory of making “I’m a Believer.” “It’s probably my signature Monkees tune, though,” he said in 2016. “I can’t explain why it’s proven to be so popular. You can’t reduce art like that, especially collaborative stuff.”

This 1978 single exhibits the Clash stretching their sound and figuring out their principles in real time. Over a buoyant groove, Joe Strummer recounts an all-night reggae party at a London venue that proved too pop for his taste, then turns his ire toward fashionable punk bands “turning rebellion into money.” It’s one of Strummer’s catchiest songs, condensing vignette and conviction into a package that showed the Clash were more than just a scrappy punk band. There’s a reason the song was a mainstay of Strummer’s sets even after the Clash — in fact, it was one of the last songs the late frontman ever played.

When Prince recorded “1999,” he would go all day and all night without rest and turn down food, since he felt eating would make him sleepy. The opening verse was originally recorded in three-part harmony; Prince split up the vocals, and the harmony parts became a new, odd melody. The single’s first release didn’t make the Top 40, but Prince put it out again after “Little Red Corvette,” and it was finally a hit, reaching the Top 20. As keyboardist Matt Fink told Rolling Stone a few years later, “‘1999’ was pretty different for a message. Not your average bubblegum hit.”

Black Sabbath’s second LP was basically complete when producer Rodger Bain realized that the running time was around three minutes short. So the band quickly came up with this chugging, adrenalized rocker. They worried that it sounded a bit too much like Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” but stuck with it anyway, and bassist Geezer Butler worked up a set of lyrics about a man grappling with mental and emotional malaise. “I had been suffering from undiagnosed depression, and the only way of dealing with it was to write about it,” he later told Guitar World. “It was quite cathartic.”

At a time when pretty much every artist of her generation was still sticking with guitar-based pop rock, Cher took a gamble on a new futuristic technology called Auto-Tune and won big time. Her secret? Making sure that even through the robotic vocal effects, she sounded like a force to be reckoned with: “I was singing [the song] in the bathtub, and it seemed to me the second verse was too whiny. It kind of pissed me off, so I changed it. I toughened it up a bit.” “Believe” introduced the then-52-year-old singer to a whole new generation of fans, becoming an indelible anthem for the queer community and earning Cher a permanent place in the canon of empowerment-pop anthems.

“She’s Gone” is a song that thrived in its afterlife. When Hall and Oates released it in 1973, it reached Number 60 on the singles chart. Three years later, a still-scuffling Hall and Oates finally had their first smash, the smoochy ballad “Sara Smile.” When “She’s Gone” was rereleased in 1976, it gave the duo a second huge hit. Its elegant arrangements and slow-build harmonies paid tribute to the great R&B coming out of the duo’s hometown, Philadelphia. “We wouldn’t sound like this if we grew up in Iowa,” Oates later said.

Chicago native Jefferson was working at a post office when he produced one of the first great vocal house records, nailing the combination of hummable melody and headlong momentum that has pulled wallflowers onto the dance floor for 35 years. “The reason I wanted to have a funky piano in ‘Move Your Body’ was because of Elton John,” Jefferson explained. But since he wasn’t a skilled piano player, he recorded the part at the manageable tempo of 40 beats per minute, and then sped it up to the canonical house tempo of 120 bpm. Jefferson recruited a friend and fellow postal worker, Curtis McClain, to sing vocals.

“It just seemed to happen automatically,” Jerry Garcia said of the writing of one of the Dead’s most Zen-like statements. A serene peak of hippie-folk pastoralism, the song originated during the Canadian tour-by-rail commemorated in the documentary Festival Express, with Garcia setting Robert Hunter’s lyric to music between bar-car jam sessions with Janis Joplin and members of the Band. Hunter himself would declare the lyric “Let it be known there is a fountain/That was not made by the hands of men,” as “pretty much my favorite line I ever wrote.”

Even after Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder asserted their musical independence, the Motown production assembly line continued to work wonders. “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” a cinematic seven-minute epic of African American musical history and social realism, was previously recorded by the Undisputed Truth before the Temptations turned it into a smash. But the Tempts were hardly Norman Whitfield’s puppets. “We asked for him because we thought he had the capacity to bring out everybody’s talent instead of just one [singer] at a time,” said Temptation Melvin Franklin.

“Before that song, Rihanna was just a pop-single girl,” said Terius “the Dream” Nash, who co-wrote “Umbrella.” “Now she got paparazzi following her around.” An international Number One that transformed the Barbadian singer into a superstar, the song was the prototype for Rihanna’s massive run of hook-storm hits to follow. Amazingly, both Britney Spears and Mary J. Blige passed on the song before it fell into RiRi’s lap. “I’m so thankful for it,” she said. “I prayed for this song.”

“Please Mr. Postman” wasn’t just the first Motown recording to go Number One, it was Brian Holland’s first producing job, and the first time the Marvelettes — then the high school harmonizers the Casinyets — had been inside a recording studio. Holland and co-producer Robert Bateman helped fill in a sketch written by departed group member Georgia Dobbins, bringing in Freddie Gorman, an actual postman (who was still in uniform at the studio) for verisimilitude. Afterward, Berry Gordy decided to rename the marvelous group the Marvelettes.

“Big Poppa,” the song that smoothed out the Notorious B.I.G.’s tough image and solidified his radio and MTV stardom, came out of the late Brooklyn rapper’s and producer Chucky Thompson’s admiration for massive G-funk hits like Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” Thompson added a funky earworm keyboard line to a sample of the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets,” and left the beat rolling in the studio. When he returned, Biggie had its classic club chorus: “Throw your hands in the air if youse a true player.”

The Puerto Rican reggaeton trailblazer made excellent use of his Covid-19 quarantine, releasing three explosive albums in 2020: “I just thought, ‘Damn. What people need is entertainment,’” he told Rolling Stone. “Safaera,” from the fantastic YHLQMDLG, compacts the sweat-soaked, high-octane vigor of a Nineties-era reggaeton mixtape into a jolting five minutes packed with at least nine beat flips, multiple Puerto Rican guest stars, unflinchingly irreverent lyrics, and samples ranging from Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” to Alexis and Fido’s “El Tiburon.” It’s a song that feels like a writhing, living thing.

The stark, poignant ballad “Under the Bridge” was a breakthrough hit for the Chili Peppers, shattering their party-boy image. It started as an autobiographical confession from frontman Anthony Kiedis, who counted an experience with some gang members under an actual Los Angeles bridge as a low point of his drug addiction. Kiedis started writing it while feeling lonely after a band rehearsal, following the death of the Chili’s guitarist Hillel Slovak. “L.A. — the hills, the buildings, the people in it as a whole — that seemed to be looking out for me more than any human being,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992.

Blige’s second R&B chart topper was written two years earlier in a basement in Queens. Producer Kevin Rooney made the track using a medley of keyboards and the stuttered percussion pattern from Audio Two’s old-school-rap hit “Top Billin’.” Mark Morales — a.k.a. Prince Markie Dee of the Fat Boys — wrote the lyrics. The result was a swinging, gospelized lament that would reshape the sound of R&B in the Nineties. Rooney wanted to get rid of the Audio Two sample and play the drums himself, but executive producer Sean “Puffy” Combs kept it in, telling Rooney, “That’s what makes it hip-hop.”

Rilo Kiley was one of the most exciting indie-rock bands of the early 2000s, and they hit a power-pop peak with “Portions for Foxes.” Jenny Lewis sang about a bad-news relationship, while Blake Sennett piled on ornery guitar fire. Had it come out 10 years earlier, the song might have been an alt-rock radio hit. But it ended up getting a boost all the same when it was used by the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, and Lewis still breaks out the song at her solo shows.

With its enormous kaboom and Pop’s sneering, free-associative lyrics (the line about “hypnotizing chickens” is a reference to William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded), “Lust for Life” is a kiss-off to drugged-out hedonism. The opening riff was supposedly taken from some Morse-code producer David Bowie had heard on the Armed Forces Network. And the line “Of course I’ve had it in the ear before”? “That’s a common expression in the Midwest,” Pop said. “To ‘give it to him right in the ear’ means to fuck somebody over.”

“Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” is a seamless three-part saga about nostalgia, dashed expectations, Long Island, and Long Island accents. Joel, the Irving Berlin of suburbia, packs an entire Broadway musical into seven and a half minutes, as he tells the story of Brenda and Eddie, popular kids who marry young, then flameout and divorce — as Joel put it, “People who peaked a little too early in life.” In structuring the song, Joel wanted to replicate the way George Martin had collaged different ideas together for Side Two of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. “Not that I’d ever think we could do something as good as that,” he added.

Although Don Everly had a contract to work as a songwriter before he and his brother Phil began their hitmaking, their first three big singles were all written by the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. “I would go to them for lovelorn advice when I was young, and divorce advice when I was older,” Phil said. “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” with Chet Atkins’ innovative tremolo chording backing the brothers’ high-lonesome harmonies, went to Number One on not just the pop chart, but the R&B chart as well.

Written in about a half hour and recorded in his basement in Topanga Canyon, California, this sci-fi piano ballad — just Young accompanied by a forlorn French horn — is an ecological plea inspired by his friend Dean Stockwell’s idea for a movie about a natural disaster that destroys California. The movie never got made, but the song immediately touched a nerve. As Randy Newman admiringly noted, “‘After the Gold Rush’ is sort of a primal urge for a simpler, better time — which may have never existed, but Neil thinks it does.”