When music critic Dave Marsh published his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made in 1989, he declared “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” the greatest single of them all — and as the years go by, the selection seems more and more unassailable. Marvin Gaye’s searing account of […]

Say this much for Jakob Dylan: the guy’s got balls. It’s one thing to pursue a career in music, a profession with a 90 percent failure rate; it’s another thing when your father is Bob Dylan, whose musical career is the gold standard by which all others are judged. And it’s another thing altogether to […]

“We’re an American Band” is rock’n’roll in its purest, uncut form. Big, loud and unapologetically primal, with the style and sophistication of a club-wielding caveman bludgeoning a sabertooth tiger, Grand Funk Railroad’s first number one single is an unabashed love letter to rock music as both lifestyle and lifeforce, a lurid yet lucid celebration of […]

“Wichita Lineman” is an American masterpiece — a timeless portrait of prairie-gothic isolation and desperation. Recorded in May 1968 by country-pop crossover sensation Glen Campbell, songwriter Jimmy Webb’s ballad of everyman angst spins blue-collar pathos into a haunting meditation on existential desire, culminating in one of most profound expressions of love and longing in the […]

Very few people experience heartbreak as publicly as Ariana Grande. A ubiquitous pop culture figure since her teenage years, Grande hit a new zenith with 2018’s “thank u, next,” a spectacular pop song doubling as a candid document of personal tumult. Written in the wake of a concert bombing, the accidental death-by-overdose of ex-boyfriend (and […]

“Date with the Night,” the lead single from Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 debut LP Fever to Tell, heralded the mainstream arrival of a band fervently boosted by critics and industry leaders since the dawn of the millennium. While another song from the same album — the world-conquering “Maps” — turned Yeah Yeah Yeahs into icons, […]

It doesn’t matter who sings a song first — only who sings it best. “For Once in My Life” passed through more hands than a church collection plate before it finally landed with Stevie Wonder, who reluctantly but winningly made the song his own, creating an instant pop standard that remains one of Motown Records’ […]

If you were conceived anytime after the summer of 1973, there’s a good chance you owe your existence to “Let’s Get It On.” Marvin Gaye’s smoldering celebration of libido and liberation possesses an aphrodisiacal power unmatched in the annals of popular music: no song is more universally synonymous with unbridled lust and longing, and no […]

“He yearns after normalcy with an intensity that crackles and burns through his movies,” the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote of the filmmaker Nicholas Ray, and the same could be said of the songs of Art Alexakis, Everclear’s singer and guitarist. Alexakis has been through some shit, and his gnawing hunger for stability — the […]

“I Will Survive” is so ingrained in American culture that just the utterance of its title summons its elements from memory — its strutting beat, orchestral hits and the resilient shout of Gloria Gaynor are all immediately recognizable. Arguably no other song means quite so much to so many: “I Will Survive” has been repurposed […]