After pushing Crazy Horse out of his career, Neil Young spiraled into creative chaos. Their reunions reveal how this volatile partnership ultimately fueled some of his most powerful music.

It’s one of the wildest stories in music history: Kris Kristofferson landed a helicopter in Johnny Cash’s yard just to get Cash to listen to one of his songs. The stunt was audacious, almost unbelievable—and it worked.

As Freddie Mercury’s health declined in 1991, he avoided dramatic farewells or emotional declarations. Friends and bandmates later recalled that he preferred calm, normal conversations and resisted turning his final days into a spectacle. But even without a formal goodbye, what he said—and didn’t say—left a lasting impact.

In the 1970s, radio was full of songs people loved to complain about—some because they were overplayed, others because they were bold, obvious, theatrical, or even a little embarrassing. People groaned, mocked them, and secretly knew every word. Ask those same listeners today, and most would probably admit that this kind of fearless personality is exactly what modern music is missing.

Some songs feel like diary entries accidentally left on the radio. “In The Air Tonight” is one of those rare tracks that sounds less like a hit single and more like a private meltdown set to echoing synths and a famously delayed drum fill. By the time Phil Collins released it in 1981, he wasn’t trying to reinvent pop music—he was trying to survive the wreckage of his personal life. What came out instead was a haunting anthem that turned private heartbreak into public mythology and permanently fused Collins’ name to four minutes of restrained fury.

Country music has never been short on heartbreak, sin, or scandal—but for decades, it preferred those topics safely filtered through male voices. Then Loretta Lynn showed up and started singing about women’s lives the way women actually lived them. When she released “The Pill,” the genre wasn’t just uncomfortable—it panicked. The backlash was fierce, the bans were real, and the conversation she sparked never stopped echoing.