"Grenade" was a term used on the show Jersey Shore to mean an ugly girl. Bruno Mars says his hit song with that title was written before the show started.
KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" was inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of Patti Smith on the cover of her album Horses.
The movie The Breakfast Club opens with a passage from David Bowie's "Changes" ("And these children that you spit on...")
Bob Marley gave the songwriting credit for "No Woman No Cry" to his friend Vincent Ford, who ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, the area of Kingston where Marley grew up.
MTV reversed the word "joint" in Tom Petty's "You Don't Known How It Feels" so it was unintelligible, but gave the video a VMA anyway.
David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" was likely based on various musicians in his ambit, including Iggy Pop (zIGGY), and Jimi Hendrix, who played guitar left-handed ("He played it left hand").
The Scorpions and UFO guitarist is also a very prolific songwriter - he explains how he writes with his various groups, and why he was so keen to get out of Germany and into England.
The country sweetheart opines about the demands of touring and talks about writing songs with her famous father.
The king of Christian worship music explains talks about writing songs for troubled times.
It took him seven years to recover from his American hit "Fool (If You Think It's Over)," but Chris Rea became one of the top singer-songwriters in his native UK.
We ring the Hell's Bells to see what songs and rockers are sincere in their Satanism, and how much of it is an act.
The Kiss rocker covers a lot of ground in this interview, including why there are no Kiss collaborations, and why the Rock Hall has "become a sham."