Sourced and spun.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Alive!
It is billed as a live album but a good deal of it was rebuilt in the studio afterward. It saved the record label from bankruptcy.
Slippery When Wet
They played demos to groups of New Jersey teenagers and cut the songs the kids liked least. It sold twenty-eight million copies.
Buffalo Springfield Again
The band was falling apart while they made it, recording their songs separately. Neil Young quit twice before it was finished.
Bat Out of Hell
Every label turned it down, and Todd Rundgren produced it partly because he thought it was a parody. It has sold over forty million.
Use Your Illusion II
Knockin' on Heaven's Door is a Bob Dylan song written for a western. The video for Estranged cost around four million dollars to make.
Use Your Illusion I
Both volumes were recorded together and released the same day, because the band could not agree on what to leave off a single album.
New York Dolls
Todd Rundgren produced it in about a week and nobody was happy with how it sounded. It sold almost nothing and changed everything.
Made in Japan
The band thought a live album was a waste of time and only agreed because it was for the Japanese market alone.
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!
Recorded on the 1969 American tour, weeks before Altamont. Charlie Watts posed for the cover with a donkey carrying the band's instruments.
2112
The label wanted something commercial, so Rush delivered a twenty-minute dystopian suite about a banned guitar. It worked, and bought them their freedom.
Rocks
They recorded it in a converted warehouse they rented as a clubhouse. Slash and Kurt Cobain both named it the record that started them.
Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd
The band named themselves after a gym teacher who kept sending them home over their hair. Free Bird's guitar outro runs five minutes.
Disraeli Gears
The title came from a roadie getting derailleur gears wrong. They recorded the whole thing in New York in under a week.
Raw Power
David Bowie mixed it and everyone including Iggy Pop hated the result. Iggy remixed the whole thing himself twenty-four years later.
Toys in the Attic
The title of Walk This Way came from a line in Young Frankenstein, which the band went to see during a break in the sessions.
Axis: Bold as Love
Hendrix left the finished master of side one in a taxi and had to mix the whole thing again overnight.
Houses of the Holy
The song called Houses of the Holy is not on Houses of the Holy. The cover children were photographed at the Giant's Causeway.
Sticky Fingers
Andy Warhol's sleeve had a real working zip, which scratched the records stacked behind it in the crates. The tongue logo starts here.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Three years of litigation kept Springsteen out of a studio, and when he got back in he gave away most of the catchy songs.
Beggars Banquet
The label refused the original sleeve, a photograph of a graffitied lavatory wall, and held the record back for months over it.
A Night at the Opera
The most expensive record ever made at the time, and they layered the Bohemian Rhapsody vocals until the tape went nearly transparent.
Highway to Hell
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
Physical Graffiti
They did not have enough songs for a double album, so they raided outtakes from three earlier records to fill it out.
Led Zeppelin II
Written and recorded in snatched hours in studios across two continents while touring. Willie Dixon later sued over the words to Whole Lotta Love.
Led Zeppelin
Guitarist Jimmy Page paid for the sessions himself and the record took about thirty-six hours of studio time. Nobody had heard drums recorded like that.
Back in Black
Their singer had died five months earlier. They hired Brian Johnson, put out a record in an all-black sleeve, and sold fifty million.
Appetite for Destruction
It sold almost nothing for a year until MTV agreed to play Welcome to the Jungle once, at four in the morning. Then it never stopped.
Who's Next
What survived an abandoned science-fiction project became this record. The keyboard figure opening Baba O'Riley was generated by a machine rather than played.
Let It Bleed
Merry Clayton was called in at midnight, heavily pregnant, to sing on Gimme Shelter. Her voice cracks on the third take and Jagger whoops.
Electric Ladyland
Hendrix produced it himself, and spent so long in the studio that his manager walked out. One track is thirteen minutes of imagined underwater life.
Led Zeppelin IV
There is no title and no band name anywhere on the sleeve, just four symbols the members chose. The label thought it was commercial suicide.
Are You Experienced?
Hendrix cut it on four tracks in stolen studio hours between gigs, and nobody had heard a guitar do any of it before.