
Richard Marx' debut single "Don't Mean Nothing" features Joe Walsh on guitar.

The Boyz II Men hit "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" is an a capella cover of a song from 1975 by G.C. Cameron that was used in the movie Cooley High to express the feeling of parting ways with high school friends.

The James Blunt song "You're Beautiful" is not romantic: it's a about a creepy subway encounter with an ex.

Avril Lavigne's 2011 song "Darlin" was written much earlier; she says it's the second song she ever wrote, composed when she was an unsigned 15-year-old living in Napanee, Ontario. The song reflects those years when she was "trying to figure it all out."

"Talk To Ya Later" proved the power of MTV when sales of Tubes albums picked up in markets like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the network was available.

Billy Joel wrote "We Didn't Start The Fire" after a 21-year-old told him, "everyone knows that nothing happened in the '50s."
Our chat with Barney Hoskyns, who covers the wild years of Woodstock - the town, not the festival - in his book Small Town Talk.
In the name of song explanation, Al talks about scoring heroin for William Burroughs, and that's not even the most shocking story in this one.
The Bush frontman on where he finds inspiration for lyrics, if his "machine head" is a guitar tuner, and the stories behind songs from the album The Kingdom.
How did The Edge get his name? Did they name a song after a Tolkien book? And who is "Angel of Harlem" about?
Inspired by his dear friend, "Seasons in the Sun" paid for Terry's boat, which led him away from music and into a battle with Canadian paper mills.
How the American gangsta rappers made history by getting banned in the UK.