Defining Songs
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The Ten Best Songs of All Time
This is it. The biggest of the big time. You’ve seen the top 10 singers, you’ve debated the best bands, you’ve scripted rants in your head that we only have to wait a short while before they show up in our inbox.
That’s one of the most enjoyable aspect of music. It’s about more than just listening to it or lip-syncing the words in front of the bathroom mirror. Nailing the dance moves can be satisfying and perusing the liner notes of your favorite albums can prove a riveting read but where music really pays off? The debates!
That said, we don’t like to leave these matters solely up to opinion. So, we’ve run the numbers. First, we looked at some of the bestselling artists of all time, then we took what we feel is the most significant song from their biggest album. That’s what we’re here for, so sit back, relax, make sure you have your own opinions on hand to let us know just how wrong you think we are, and check out the top 10 songs of all time.
by Ledgernote
U2 – With or Without You
We warned you. We aren’t messing around with this list. Too much is at stake! Which is why, despite being the lead single off U2’s 1987 monster album The Joshua Tree, “With or Without You” appears at the bottom.
The album itself is a stone-cold, certified classic, selling an eye-watering 25 million copies worldwide, storming charts all over the globe, being named by the BBC as the defining album of the ‘eighties ’80s, and confirming the Irish band as superstars. Simply put, albums don’t come much bigger.
The album is a Grammy Hall of Fame member since 2003, and includes such singles as “Candle in the Wind” and “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” but we opted to highlight “Bennie and the Jets”. It’s a big glittery slab of glam-rock as translated through the prism that is Elton John.
The song in anyone else’s hands would come off as silly and negligible. But not when Sir Elton delivers its words. Its commercial popularity is backed by industry-wide respect, with Axl Rose name-checking it as a key inspiration, and everyone from Lady Gaga to A Tribe Called Quest covering or sampling it.
Elton John – Bennie and the Jets
The Rolling Stones – Paint It, Black
Are the Rolling Stones the world’s greatest singles band? It seems disrespectful to even pose the question of a band that have to their name such classic LPs as Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Let it Bleed, but when you consider the success enjoyed by their compilations, perhaps it’s not such a baseless question after all. Their first collection, 1971’s Hot Rocks 1964-1971, is their biggest seller and covers everything from “Brown Sugar” to “Sympathy for the Devil”. But even among such singles royalty, “Paint It, Black” stands out.
“Stairway” is a perfect illustration of what made the band so irresistible in their early days. John Paul Jones’ keyboard and bass lines would become more of a fixture on subsequent albums, but this is Page and singer Robert Plant at their most regal.
The song is effectively split into two parts; the first is a folksy, mystical ode to an unnamed wise woman, while the second part, ushered in by an unusually restrained drum fill by John Bonham, sees Plant transition from cosmic narrator to winking collaborator before Page blows the roof off the thing.
Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven
Pink Floyd – Money
“Money”, the album’s lead single, is an astonishing piece of work—a commentary on insatiable greed set to a six-minute funk workout, complete with looped sound effects, guitar lines and interviews with the band’s crew and staff.
On paper it sounds, at best, baffling; at worst, unlistenable. But it works, even reaching pop-music levels of approachability. “Come in,” it seems to say to its listeners. “Welcome to the high life, don’t worry about all that chaos in the background, just groove out. It’s just ‘Money’, baby.”
“Papa Don’t Preach”, from the dramatic strings of the opening and the Prince-flavored bass line, to the bone-dry snare and Latin-flavored guitar lines, is ’80s pop at its catchiest. Madonna’s vocal range is also at its most expansive as it narrates the story of a ‘girl in trouble’, confessing her pregnancy to her conservative father. The emotive lyrics and serious subject matter elevate what was already a funky pop gem into something altogether more significant, much like what Madonna was doing with her own career.
Madonna – Papa Don’t Preach
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Standing proud at center stage is the oversized jewel in the crown: “Bohemian Rhapsody”. At six minutes, the song is sheer aural excess conceived so singularly by band leader and possible extraterrestrial Freddie Mercury that the rest of the band referred to it during rehearsal simply as “Fred’s Thing.”
And what a thing it is. We will not waste your time doing an injustice to this song by trying to describe it in words. But we will make a point of saying that it is one of the most perfectly titled pieces of art we know of..
“Suspicious Minds” was actually written by Mark James, a hitmaker based in Elvis’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. (James was also responsible for another of Elvis’s signature pieces, “Always on My Mind”.) It was released to commercial indifference in 1968.
The next year, during sessions at the American Sound Studio, which resulted in the album From Elvis in Memphis, James played the song for Presley, who thought it might make a hit and quickly recorded a version of his own.
Elvis Presley – Suspicious Minds
The Beatles – A Day In The Life
The song itself “A Day in the Life” sums up everything that’s great about the album and indeed the band. It feels at once epic and pastoral, nostalgic and progressive, a head-spinning combination of the mundane and the extraordinary.
If the album is, as many contemporary commentators (including the band themselves) claim, the moment they left their clean-cut image behind and stepped into the future, then this song could well be the Dear John letter in which they bid that world farewell and move on to greener, more exotic pastures.
From the King to the Prince. The second single from the biggest-selling album worldwide of all time, Jackson’s 1982 magnum opus, Thriller. Reprising his relationship with production expert Quincy Jones, Jackson sought to move away from the disco sound of ’79’s Off the Wall and compose an album on which every track was a hit.
He succeeded regardless of genre. This album, according to the Library of Congress, resides as a culturally significant artifact, and almost single-handedly rejuvenated pop music in a post-disco/pre-MTV America in the grip of a recession.
Michael Jackson – Thriller
