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Songwriters spend their whole lives trying to hone and craft their music in such a way that it will strike a chord with listeners, but sometimes they just end up getting on their own nerves. Often it’s the songs that become an artist’s most popular hits that can drive their creators to distraction, especially if they start to feel like their entire oeuvre has become reduced to a one-hit wonder punchline.
Whether it’s Nirvana hating the scent of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, or Radiohead getting the creeps from “Creep”, here are 13 songs that wound up winding up the musicians who wrote them.
Oasis – “Wonderwall” (1995)
Liam and Noel Gallagher are clearly thrilled to be getting the band back together for new shows (not to mention the associated payday) but the brothers may not be quite as excited as their fans about one particular singalong moment. Back in 2008, while promoting Dig Out Your Soul, Liam Gallagher remarked of their new record: “At least there’s no ‘Wonderwall’ on there. I can’t f***ing stand that f***ing song! Every time I have to sing it, I want to gag.” He particularly lamented the song’s cultural predominance in the United States, adding: “Problem is, it was a big, big tune for us. You go to America, and they’re like: ‘Are you, Mr Wonderwall?’ You want to chin someone.” In a rare example of sibling agreement, Noel also isn’t the biggest fan of the song. He said in a 2017 interview: “‘Wonderwall’ has become a worldwide hit, and I will get stopped all over the world, in any city you care to name, and people will sing ‘Wonderwall’. I don’t particularly like that song – I think ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ is a far superior song.”
Billy Joel – “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (1989)
It may have been one of his biggest commercial hits but Billy Joel doesn’t think much of his late-Eighties quickfire lyrical history lesson. In 1993, Joel remarked: “Take a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. It’s really not much of a song … If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill.” He hadn’t changed his mind by 2010 when he told Howard Stern: “I think it’s probably the worst musical thing I’ve ever written. I don’t think it’s much of a melody.”
Guns N’ Roses – “Sweet Child of Mine” (1987)
“Sweet Child of Mine” gave the band their first and only No 1 single but guitarist Slash was never a fan. “I was f***ing around with this stupid little riff,” he recalled to Q magazine in 2005. “Axl said, ‘Hold the f***ing phones! That’s amazing!’” Turning the riff into an actual song proved challenging. “Writing and rehearsing it to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth,” remembered Slash. “For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.”
Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)
A classic example of a band setting out to write a hit and succeeding well beyond their expectations. “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song,” Kurt Cobain told journalist David Fricke in 1994, adding that he was heavily inspired by the loud-quiet-loud dynamics of Pixies. When the song became a monster success on radio and MTV, Cobain began to refuse to play it live or else intentionally butchered it. “Once it got into the mainstream, it was over,” he remarked. “I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that.” He was self-aware enough to know that his loathing came because of the song’s success, not despite it. “The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times,” he pointed out. “It’s been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better than that song, like ‘Drain You’. That’s definitely as good as ‘Teen Spirit’. I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as ‘Teen Spirit’, I wouldn’t like it as much.”
Warrant – “Cherry Pie” (1990)
The story of how the glam rock anthem “Cherry Pie” was baked is a tale as old as time. The second album by LA rockers Warrant was about to come out but the label insisted it didn’t hear a single and wanted something more like Aerosmith’s “Love In An Elevator.” Frontman Jani Lane quickly wrote and submitted “Cherry Pie”, and Columbia Records couldn’t have been happier. “All of a sudden, the album’s called Cherry Pie, the record’s called ‘Cherry Pie’, I’m doing cherry pie-eating contests…,” Lane recalled to VH1 in 2006. “My legacy’s cherry pie. Everything about me is cherry pie. I’m a cherry pie guy. I could shoot myself in the f***ing head for writing that song.” By 2007, however, Lane was feeling more circumspect. “I’m happy as a clam to have written a song that is still being played and still dug by so many people,” he told a radio interviewer. “It’s hard enough to write a song, let alone one that sticks around.”
REM – “Shiny Happy People” (1991)
Included on REM’s classic album Out of Time and the band’s first top 10 hit in the UK, this upbeat single was also considered as a potential theme song for Friends before frontman Michael Stipe turned the sitcom down. The lyric of the chorus was lifted from a translation of a Chinese government propaganda poster published after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, while the song itself was the band’s attempt to write a bubblegum pop song. Stipe has since described it as being “primarily written for children”. The frontman also openly said the song has “limited appeal” to him but always stopped short of outright denigrating it. “I try to never say anything bad about the songs I don’t particularly like, because there might be somebody out there who hears it to whom the song means everything, and represents something in their life that is essential,” he said. “I don’t want to take that from them.”
Radiohead – “Creep” (1992)
Radiohead’s debut single launched them into the public consciousness but they went years without playing it live. In fairness, recording the song hadn’t been their idea in the first place – producers Sean Slade and Paul Q Kolderie encouraged them to do so, and the band ended up using enough elements of the 1974 Hollies hit “The Air That I Breathe”, written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, that they were eventually required to share the songwriting credit. In recent years, the song has started to worm its way back into their setlists. “It’s a good song,” guitarist Ed O’Brien told Rolling Stone in 2017. “It’s nice to play for the right reasons. People like it and want to hear it. We do err towards not playing it because you don’t want it feel like showbusiness. But we started throwing it in last year.” Frontman Thom Yorke added: “We only did it once or twice this year. The first time I’m feeling the fakes we’ll stop. It can be cool sometimes, but other times I want to stop halfway through and be like, ‘Nah, this isn’t happening.’”
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Led Zeppelin – “Stairway to Heaven” (1971)
Robert Plant was in his early twenties when he sat down to add lyrics to Jimmy Page’s idea for the epic song that became “Stairway to Heaven”. As he got older, he began to view his efforts more critically. “If you absolutely hated ‘Stairway to Heaven’, no one can blame you for that because it was so… pompous,” he told Q in 1988. “Lyrically, now, I can’t relate to it, because it was so long ago. I would have no intention ever to write along those abstract lines any more.” That same year, he added in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: “I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show, I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don’t know.”
Metallica – “Escape” (1984)
“Escape” was a late addition to Metallica’s second album Ride the Lightning, and frontman James Hetfield was never truly won over by the hastily written song. The band had never once played it live before they performed the album in full at their own Orion Music + More Festival in 2012. “This is groundbreaking right here,” Hetfield told the audience. “This is historical for those of you who might know what’s coming up next. The song that we never wanted to play live ever is now on the setlist. We’re not afraid, we just hope it is good. And we’ll do our best. You can sing along if you want, all right? That might help.”
Beastie Boys – “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” (1986)
Beastie Boys member Mike D later recalled that their rabble-rousing hit “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” was written in “about five minutes” in the art-filled Michael Todd Room at the Palladium nightclub in New York. If they intended the song to satirise a certain jock-y, bro-y, segment of their fanbase, that message got lost in translation. “The only thing that upsets me is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different,” Mike D complained in 1987. “There were tons of guys singing along to [‘Fight for Your Right’] who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them. Irony is often missed.”
Pink – “Don’t Let Me Get Me” (2002)
Pink’s cry-for-help single “Don’t Let Me Get Me” was critically acclaimed and an international chart hit when it was first released, but a decade later the song’s creator had completely had enough of it. “I wish I could burn that song and never sing it again!” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2012, although she did manage to laugh about it.
The Who – “Pinball Wizard” (1969)
“Pinball Wizard” is regarded by many as the centrepiece of The Who’s 1969 concept album Tommy, but it’s held in somewhat less regard by the man who wrote it, Pete Townshend. “I knocked it off. I thought, ‘Oh, my God this is awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I’ve ever done. Oh my God, I’m embarrassed. This sounds like a music hall song,” he recalled later. “I scribbled it out and all the verses were the same length and there was no kind of middle eight. It was going to be a complete dud, but I carried on.”
Ariana Grande – “Put Your Hearts Up” (2011)
These days Ariana Grande is a pop behemoth. With over 98 billion global streams the Florida-born singer is one of the most listened-to artists in the world, but her transition from Nickelodeon child star to musician didn’t get off to the smoothest start. Her debut single “Put Your Hearts Up”, co-written by 4 Non Blondes’ Linda Perry, was a bubblegum pop song that Grande later told Rolling Stone she felt was “inauthentic and fake”. She added: “For the video, they gave me a bad spray tan and put me in a princess dress and had me frolic around the street. The whole thing was straight out of hell. I still have nightmares about it, and I made them hide it on my Vevo page.”
