It’s rare for the guitar to be the subject of a song rather than the instrument another topic is carried by.
However, songs about guitars often embed the naturally emotional, soul-tugging qualities of the instrument into unique metaphors, drawing a natural line between pain and musical expression.
Our playlist collects some stand-out songs about guitars from an array of genres and decades of music, from pop tracks about high-school heartbreak to old-school rock n’ roll anthems.
Songs About Guitars
1. Taylor Swift – Teardrops On My Guitar
The second Taylor Swift single to ever be released, Teardrops On My Guitar is a soft country pop song about falling in love with a high school boy who’s already taken.
Swift summons the blushed aura of the fleeting moments spent with your crush before facing the peril of letting him go;
“Drew talks to me, I laugh ’cause it’s just so funny that I can’t even see anyone when he’s with me, he says he’s so in love, he’s finally got it right, I wonder if he knows he’s all I think about at night … I’ll bet she’s beautiful, that girl he talks about and she’s got everything that I have to live without.”
Teardrops On My Guitar is a teen anthem with a lovelorn message extending across the generations, its chorus anchored in an artful guitar theme;
“He’s the reason for the teardrops on my guitar, the only thing that keeps me wishing on a wishing star, he’s the song in the car I keep singing, don’t know why I do.”
2. Bruce Springsteen – House Of A Thousand Guitars
This later Bruce Springsteen track is crafted around a rockstar’s metaphor for nirvana. House Of A Thousand Guitars uses its title to depict a place of peace and glory, its lyrics masterfully clustered with musical references such as;
“So wake and shake off your troubles, my friend, we’ll go where the music never ends, from the stadiums to the small-town bars, we’ll light up the house of a thousand guitars.”
Composed in an ingenious time signature, this track allows its initial acoustic soundscape to swell into a distorted rock anthem, before dissipating back to its original minimalism.
Alongside Springsteen’s lyrical choices, he implies the sense of the house of a thousand guitars actually being Heaven above, working religious-style imagery into his lyrics such as ‘brothers and sisters’, ‘souls’, and ‘light’.
3. Elvis Presley – Guitar Man
Guitar Man is a vintage rock n’ roll track laced with blues and country influences, originally recorded by Elvis Presley in 1968.
This track details the life of a guitarist roaming from town to town in search of a job as a professional musician, highlighting the ever-present cycle of struggle and success faced by creatives across the board;
“For the next three weeks I went hunting them nights, just looking for a place to play, well, I thought my picking would set ’em on fire but nobody wanted to hire a guitar man.”
Guitar Man is backlit by realistic themes of poverty often ignored by rock music for the sake of glamour, crafting a song for guitarists and artists who can’t seem to get their career on track;
“I thumbed on down to Panama City, started picking out some of them all night bars, hoping I could make myself a dollar, making music on my guitar, I got the same old story at them all night piers: there ain’t no room around here for a guitar man, we don’t need a guitar man, son.”
4. Dwight Yoakham – Guitars, Cadillacs
Dwight Yoakham’s retro country piece entitled Guitars, Cadillacs, is an uptempo track putting a distractingly bright disguise over a brokenhearted lyrical theme.
Guitars, Cadillacs is fashioned into a metaphor for the finer things in life that help the narrator pull himself through his misery; “Now it’s guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, lonely, lonely streets that I call home, yeah my guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, it’s the only thing that keeps me hanging on.”
Whilst revealing the memory of a cruel and cold-hearted woman, Yoakham’s track is dedicated to those surmounting despair by delving back into their tried and true hobbies; “Girl you taught me how to hurt real bad and cry myself to sleep, and showed me how this town can shatter dreams.”
5. The Beatles – While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Likely the most famous track featured on our list, The Beatles 1968 album track, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, uses its title metaphor as a reflection on the progress still yet to be made by mankind.
This song looks at the undiscovered potential for Earthwide peace and love, overpowering all trace of hatred left in mankind, whilst artistically attributing human emotions to an instrument, conjuring the disoriented, psychedelic art style of its era;
“I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping, while my guitar gently weeps … With every mistake we must surely be learning, still my guitar gently weeps.”
6. The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar
The Chemical Brothers’ 2002 release, Star Guitar, surprisingly houses not a single guitar within its soundscape. Rather, this retro club anthem is centred in a vibrantly nostalgic electronic ambience; a time capsule of its era as refreshing and catchy as at its original release.
With only two lyrics clouding in the distance of the track, there’s no knowing what The Chemical Brothers ‘star guitar’ reference is actually referring to, crafting a pop song with an inconspicuous dash of mystery.
7. Polo G ft. Scorey – Broken Guitars
Polo G & Scorey’s 2021 collab, Broken Guitars, gathers inspiration from R&B, rap, hip-hop and pop into a motivating message of following your desires and attaining glory, riches and happiness.
Whilst the duo’s guitar reference is rooted in the lines, “I bought two guitars, singing like it’s Rolling Loud when I’m on the stage,” their title hints either at failures along the way which encourage you towards success, or the exhibition of a rockstar’s celebratory attitude of destruction.
Despite being rooted in the rap genre, Polo G & Scorey plant an array of guitar-based rock music references into their lyrics, cleverly weaving them into their own genre’s context; “I got bands on me like Aerosmith, why I walk this way.”