
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
No romance this century has come close: Kaufman's premise, that you could pay to have someone erased, turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has said about breakups.

No romance this century has come close: Kaufman's premise, that you could pay to have someone erased, turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has said about breakups.

Kanye recorded one of the songs with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
Rick Rubin's first rap production in years, a Billy Squier drum break, and a second verse about a traffic stop.

A marching ARC Choir sample, Rhymefest's co-write, and a label convinced nobody would play a rap record about God.

A dembow riddim from Luny Tunes, an uncredited hook from Glory, and a place in the National Recording Registry.

John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.

Flowers wrote it after a bad night at a Vegas bar; Britain has kept it charting past 500 weeks.

The Neptunes built it from tongue clicks and almost nothing else, and it gave Snoop his first number one.

Pink passed on it and Duff couldn't hit the notes, so Clarkson asked for heavier guitars and won a Grammy.

Two songs welded together, the tempo dropping a minute in, and a sniper film lending Kapranos his double-edged title.

Brock wrote it in the final days of tracking, fed up with darkness, and built indie rock's warmest chorus.

Denied the Lauryn Hill sample, West had Syleena Johnson sing the part, and got his first solo top ten.

Zinner's looped riff, twenty minutes of writing from Karen O, and a video where the tears are real.

Timbaland's beat is all snap and space, and in 2008 a presidential candidate borrowed the shoulder-brush on a Raleigh stage.

Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.

It measurably dented cheap merlot sales and sent pinot noir soaring: two middle-aged men drive through wine country, one about to be married and one unable to move on.

Nigel Godrich's sessions got scrapped, Gordon Raphael came back, and the descending twin-guitar riff turned everything into a sprint.