4 Artists Who Disliked Their Own Legendary Hit Songs

Many aspiring musicians today would kill for a solid hit. However, becoming famous for a particular song isn’t always as great as it seems. In fact, quite a few famous bands and artists straight-up hated (or at the very least, disliked) their biggest hit songs. Let’s look at just a few examples from rock music, specifically.

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1. Led Zeppelin

Few songs are as memorable and as famous in rock music history as Led Zeppelin’s famed “Stairway To Heaven” from the band’s untitled 1971 album. However, there has been quite a bit of legal hullabaloo around the song since it was first released. Those legal troubles aren’t why Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant disliked the song, though. Rather, Plant once said that he hated playing the song because he simply couldn’t relate to it anymore.

“I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show,” Plant said.

2. Dio

Remember Dio? This famed heavy metal outfit made it big in the 1980s with their famed hit single “Rainbow In The Dark” in 1983. It’s a unique and fascinating piece of work with surprisingly uplifting lyricism. However, the band’s namesake, Ronnie James Dio, hated the song so much that he almost straight-up obliterated the master tapes.

“I absolutely hated that song,” said Ronnie James Dio. “I hated that song in context to what I was trying to accomplish with the [‘Holy Diver’] album.”

3. Evanescence

Ah, “My Immortal”. The famed song that inspired angsty teens in the 2000s and fanfiction writers alike. A surprising entry on our list of artists who disliked their biggest hit, Evanescence’s Amy Lee once said that she didn’t even want to put the song on the band’s famed 2003 album Fallen.

“I seriously considered not putting it on the album,” Lee once said. “The version that I hear 99.9% of the time, I’m in a grocery store and it comes on, is this old demo that I cannot stand. It’s not even a real piano and it’s me singing late at night at my dad’s work where they had a studio and he let us go in there and record and I was in high school.”

4. Heart

This is not a surprising entry on our list of artists who disliked their biggest hit. Ann and Nancy Wilson have been very direct about their hatred for “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You”, and we totally get it. Ann, specifically, called the song’s message about seducing a hitchhiker to become pregnant “hideous”.

“It kind of stood for everything we wanted to get away from,” Ann said of the particularly vulgar song. “There was a lot of pressure on us to do the song.”

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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