Elvis Presley recorded "Always On My Mind" in 1972, but Willie Nelson's version 10 years later was the hit and won the Song of the Year Grammy.
The Sam & Dave classic "Soul Man" was re-recorded by Sam Moore and Lou Reed for the 1986 movie Soul Man, about a white guy who pretends to be black so he can get a scholarship to Harvard.
Rob Reiner named his 1986 movie "Stand By Me" after the song, since he thought The Body, a Stephen King story on which it was based, sounded like a horror movie.
The philosophical Kansas song "Dust In The Wind" is inspired by a line of Native American poetry: "For all we are is dust in the wind."
"St. Elmo's Fire (Man In Motion)" was not written for the movie, but for Rick Hanson, a wheelchair athlete whose 1985 "Man In Motion" tour logged 24,856 miles on his wheelchair in 34 countries while raising $26 million for spinal cord research.
Who writes a song about a name they found in a phone book? That's just one of the everyday things these guys find to sing about. Anything in their field of vision or general scope of knowledge is fair game. If you cross paths with them, so are you.
How the American gangsta rappers made history by getting banned in the UK.
How well do you know your protest songs (including the one that went to #1)?
After cutting his teeth on hardcore punk videos, Paul defined the grunge look with his work on "Hunger Strike" and "Man in the Box."
Our chat with Barney Hoskyns, who covers the wild years of Woodstock - the town, not the festival - in his book Small Town Talk.
Chris and his wife Tina were the rhythm section for Talking Heads when they formed The Tom Tom Club. "Genius of Love" was their blockbuster, but David Byrne only mentioned it once.
