
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.

Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.

Davis gave the players almost no written music, and his producer Teo Macero cut the tapes together afterward with a razor blade.

McCartney dreamed of his mother Mary telling him it would be all right; Harrison cut two different solos.

Simon wrote the title song and gave it to Garfunkel to sing alone, and spent years regretting it. They had broken up by release.
Iommi's riff arrived as three-minute filler for the album, Butler wrote the words fast, and Sabbath had their biggest UK hit.

Recorded mostly in the basement of his Topanga house, with an eighteen-year-old Nils Lofgren on piano, an instrument he had not played before.

It took roughly eight hundred hours of studio time, and by the end the four of them were barely speaking to each other.
Called Walpurgis until the label balked at the witchcraft, and Butler aimed the lyric at politicians who start wars.

Clapton wrote it about his best friend's wife. The long piano ending was brought in by the drummer, and he was paid for the co-write.
Osbourne heard Iommi's riff and called it a big iron bloke walking; Butler built the science fiction around that.

The title song was written in about twenty minutes as filler. Tony Iommi plays with plastic fingertips after losing his in a factory.
One of Brown's first dates with the new J.B.s, Bootsy Collins on bass at eighteen, Bobby Byrd answering every line.

Zeppelin played Reykjavik in 1970, and Plant came back with Vikings, Valhalla, and that double-tracked wail.
Taupin scribbled the lyric over breakfast at a kitchen table, and Buckmaster's strings turned it into John's first Top 10.

The bassist Phil Lesh wrote Box of Rain while his father was dying, and sang it himself. The Dead had never written this plainly before.

Seventeen days between the Life photographs from Kent State and four voices cutting it live in a Los Angeles room.

Hal Davis cut it at Hitsville West in June 1970, and Michael, eleven years old, made the ballad sound lived-in.

Morrison arranged the horns himself and has spent decades saying he does not much like the record. Everyone else disagrees.