10 Greatest Rock And Roll Collab Songs

No band can write the same song forever and ever. Even when you've gotten your sound down to a science, you sometimes need to mix things up and go outside of your comfort zone to find something that you've never heard before. That means new ideas, new styles of music, and also some new blood coming into the mix.

For each of these songs, some of the biggest stars in the world called in some of their fellow legends to assist them on tracks, and ended up getting amazing results on the charts. While not every one of these were necessarily smash hits by any stretch, the legacy that they've left has gone on much longer than anyone would expect. Whether or not people knew it at the time, this was either the kind of supergroup that comes once in a generation or just a standard collaboration track that doesn't come along every day.

Even though these two stars might seem miles apart on the creative spectrum, you can't deny the chemistry at play on these tracks, as every member bounces off each other in just the right way. There might be several acts who have tried to mimic these styles down the road, but this isn't the kind of thing that you can plan. This is lightning in a bottle, and we should count ourselves lucky to even have records like this.

In the era of MTV, the college rock scene had their own unique sound going on. At the time when the biggest names in music were Billy Idol and Michael Jackson, you also had bands like the Pixies and Sonic Youth pushing the boundaries of what you could do with indie rock. It just felt like one big club, and you'd sometimes find two legends together on one track every now and again.

After shedding some of their hardcore skin on Hootenanny, Let it Be was the first time that the Replacements really tapped into their strengths, cheekily taking the Beatles album title and slapping it on songs about disaffected ballads about being a punk in the gutter. While I Will Dare is probably the closest thing that they had to a radio hit at the time, part of the appeal came from the guitar solo, which came courtesy of Peter Buck from R.E.M.

And even though both bands were not necessarily the biggest acts in the world, you can really hear Buck's trademarks all over this song, as the guitars get a lot more jangly and more refined than what Bob Stinson's freakout solos could have hoped for. This might not have been able to light up MTV's playlist or anything, but it was a step in the right direction. Who knows? Maybe this band full of losers actually had a shot at going the distance.