Anshuman Biswas
This is not a list of the 22 greatest guitar solos ever played. I would not be able to decide on such a list, nor agree on the order on any given day. I'll leave that to the Rolling Stones Magazine, so they can inspire more generations of Prince like personalities. This is a different sort of list! A list of the 22 solos that impacted me: the ones I rewound until the tape stretched, metaphorically speaking, the ones I tried and failed to play for months, the ones I still put on when I need to remember my past.
Before the solos
I am a millennial, and my first music wasn't my choice. It was whatever the adults around me were playing, and somehow, by the time I was five, that included Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf. I didn't understand "War Pigs" in 1992. I just knew that the riff sounded like a building falling down slowly, and that I liked it more than I was supposed to. It wasn't all Rock 'n' Roll. I loved John Denver, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Harry Belafonte, Don McLean and Abba.
Then came the late nineties, and like many kids, I took the scenic route. There was a Backstreet Boys phase. Somewhere around 1998, when I was eleven, a friend played Nirvana, which altered my understading of music. After that came Pearl Jam, then Creed, whose big, earnest guitars felt like the most serious thing. On a sidenote, who remembers the MTV celebrity deathmatch between Eddie Vedder and Scott Stapp?
But grunge and post-grunge were about the riff, the scream and the mood. Hardly anybody soloed.
Near the end of the last millenium, I stopped listening to bands and started listening to guitarists: when I realised one person could emote something no singer could. These are the twenty two solos that taught me that, in roughly the order they found me. Why twenty two? Because 22 is my number. For each one I've noted the version and album I go back to, with links to listen. Where the exact live take isn't on a streaming service, that link is marked (studio), and YouTube has the performance.
Part I: The door opens (1999–2002)
1. Nothing Else Matters — Metallica
Guitarist: James Hetfield
Version: Live with the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Community Theatre, 1999
Album: S&M (1999)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
This was the bridge. Coming from Creed, I was ready for heavy and earnest, and S&M was a double CD a classmate lent me in the winter of 1999 with strict instructions to return it in one piece. I didn't return it for three weeks.
On S&M, "Nothing Else Matters" arrived with an orchestra. I had heard Yanni in concert at the Taj Mahal, but this was different. The solo came in soft and didn't shred. Years later I found out it was Hetfield playing that solo, not Kirk Hammett, and somehow that made it mean more: the guy who wrote the song also played the mesmerizing solo. It was the first time I understood that a guitar solo could be the emotional centre of a song instead of a break from it. I recorded a poor version some years after I first heard the solo.
2. November Rain — Guns N' Roses
Guitarist: Slash
Version: Tokyo Dome, 1992
Album/Video: Use Your Illusion I (live video, 1992); studio on Use Your Illusion I (1991)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
I'd seen the music video, like everyone. The wedding, the rain, the church, Slash walking out of it and playing in the middle of nowhere. But it was a worn-out VHS of the Tokyo show, passed through three or four hands before it got to me, that got me.
There are two solos in "November Rain" and they do completely different jobs. The first is a sigh. The second is a storm. Watching Slash on a stage that big, hair over his face, top hat, Les Paul slung low, I remember thinking that this is what a guitar player is supposed to look like. I'd sit with the remote and pause it on his hands, trying to see the shapes. The picture was too blurry. I learned it by ear instead, badly, for most of a year.
3. Stairway to Heaven — Led Zeppelin
Guitarist: Jimmy Page
Version: Madison Square Garden, July 1973
Album/Film: The Song Remains the Same (1976)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
Everyone tells you "Stairway" is the cliché. Every guitar shop has a joke sign about not playing it. I didn't care, because when I was fourteen nobody had told me yet.
I first heard the studio version, but the one that lives in me is Page at Madison Square Garden in the film, double-neck Gibson, dragon suit, the solo stretched and wobbling and nothing like note-perfect. That was a revelation in itself. I'd assumed great players played things right. Page played them alive. Some notes are rushed, some bends go sharp, and it doesn't matter at all, because it feels real and beautiful. That solo taught me that a performance is not a recital.
4. Highway Star — Deep Purple
Guitarist: Ritchie Blackmore
Version: Festival Hall, Osaka, 16 August 1972
Album: Made in Japan (1972)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
A cassette of Made in Japan turned up in a box that some friends were exchaning, the label nearly gone, and I played it on a Walkman on a long bus ride. "Highway Star" is the first track, and by the end of it I'd missed my stop.
What hit me was that it's a conversation. Jon Lord's organ solo throws down a challenge and Blackmore answers it with that classical, almost Bach-like run that sounds like it's being played by someone in a hurry to get somewhere. Up to then I thought of rock as guitar plus accompaniment. Made in Japan was a band arguing at full speed, and winning together.
5. Comfortably Numb — Pink Floyd
Guitarist: David Gilmour
Version: Earls Court, London, 20 October 1994
Album/Film: P·U·L·S·E (1995)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
If I have to pick one solo that changed what I thought the guitar was for, it's this one.
I was fifteen, it was late, and I was watching Pulse alone with the volume low so nobody would wake up. The second solo starts and the lights start doing things, and the giant mirror ball opens, and Gilmour just… keeps going. He doesn't play fast. He picks a note, bends it, waits, and lets it hang there long enough for you to feel it. Every phrase sounds like a sentence.
I turned the Desktop off at the end and sat in the dark for a while. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, but I know now what happened: I'd learned that space is an instrument. Every solo I've tried to play since has been, in some way, an attempt to leave room the way Gilmour does.
6. Sultans of Swing — Dire Straits
Guitarist: Mark Knopfler
Version: Hammersmith Odeon, London, 22–23 July 1983
Album: Alchemy: Dire Straits Live (1984)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
For years I knew "Sultans" as the four-minute radio song. Nice, clever, a bit of a story about a pub band. Then somebody at School put on Alchemy and let it run, and the outro just kept going!
Knopfler plays with his fingers, no pick, and on Alchemy he spends minutes in that outro doing things with his right hand that shouldn't be possible. It's fast but never frantic. Every run lands cleanly, and then he goes somewhere else. That night, at least three of us decided to try fingerstyle the next day. I'm the one who stuck with it, sort of. My right hand has never been the same, in a good way.
7. Brothers in Arms — Dire Straits
Guitarist: Mark Knopfler
Version: Wembley Arena, London, July 1985
Album: studio version on Brothers in Arms (1985); live on the Brothers in Arms tour
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
If "Sultans" is Knopfler showing you what his hands can do, "Brothers in Arms" is him showing you what he chooses not to do.
It's a war song, slow and grieving, and the solo at the end builds over a long time. It starts with a few notes and grows only as much as it needs to. I heard it properly for the first time on a rainy evening, the kind where the power cuts out and you put on something on the laptop battery because there's nothing else to do. By the end of the outro I'd forgotten the power was out. Some solos impress you. This one keeps you company. I thought between this and Down to the Waterline, but this won because of the sheer feel. Mark makes the guitar react with the slightest of touches.
Part II: Going deeper (2002–2005)
8. All Along the Watchtower — Jimi Hendrix
Guitarist: Jimi Hendrix
Version: The studio recording, 1968 (live: Atlanta International Pop Festival, 4 July 1970)
Album: Electric Ladyland (1968); live on Freedom: Atlanta Pop Festival (2015)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
I'll break my "live versions" habit here, because the studio "Watchtower" is a different kind of masterpiece. It's a Bob Dylan song that Hendrix took over so completely that Dylan himself started playing it Hendrix's way.
The solo isn't one solo. It's four little worlds in a row: a slide section, a wah section, a section of chopped rhythmic chords, and then everything again. When I first heard it on headphones, I genuinely couldn't work out how many guitars were playing. I sat down with a pencil and wrote out what changed every few seconds. It was the first time I thought about a solo as something arranged, like a piece of architecture, not just played. The Atlanta 1970 performance is great too, and raw, but the studio take is the one that taught me.
9. High Hopes — Pink Floyd
Guitarist: David Gilmour (lap steel)
Version: Earls Court, London, 20 October 1994
Album/Film: P·U·L·S·E (1995); studio original on The Division Bell (1994)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
I'd already worn out Pulse for "Comfortably Numb." Then, around 2004, I went back to it and a different song took over: "High Hopes." After that I couldn't stop. For months it was the last thing I played at night and the first thing I put on in the morning. It was on repeat for so long that the people around me started recognising the bell before I'd even pressed play.
It's a song about looking back at where you came from: the town, the friends, the version of yourself you left behind. At seventeen, I was just starting to have a past worth looking back on, and the song felt like it had been written for that exact feeling.
But what really held me was the ending. Gilmour sits down at the lap steel, and the solo stops sounding like a guitar at all. There are no frets in the way, so every note slides into the next one like a voice, rising and settling and rising again, while the Earls Court lights sweep over the crowd. I was completely mesmerised by it. I didn't even know what instrument it was at first. I just knew I'd never heard a guitar glide like that. I still listen to it on repeat. Some songs you outgrow. This one I grew into.
10. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) — Stevie Ray Vaughan
Guitarist: Stevie Ray Vaughan
Version: Austin City Limits, 10 October 1989
Album/Film: Austin City Limits broadcast (PBS)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
For a long time I remembered this as SRV playing "Purple Haze." It wasn't. It was "Voodoo Child," and the fact that my memory merged two Hendrix songs into one probably says everything about what watching it felt like.
If Hendrix is the source, SRV is the flood. He plays the Strat like he's angry at it and in love with it at the same time: heavy strings, huge tone, and that thing where he plays behind his back like it's no harder than the normal way. This was the solo that sent me back into the blues, into Albert King, B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and made me realise that everything I loved in rock had come out of that room.
11. Afraid to Shoot Strangers — Iron Maiden
Guitarists: Dave Murray and Janick Gers
Version: Donington Park, 22 August 1992
Album: Live at Donington (1993)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
Iron Maiden was the band that made metal feel like literature. Nobody I knew in school was into them; I found them on my own, on a burned CD with the track names written in marker, half of them wrong.
"Afraid to Shoot Strangers" starts slow, a song from the point of view of a soldier who doesn't want to kill anyone, and then it turns, and the twin guitars come in. At Donington, in front of a field of people, the harmony section sounds like a march and a lament at the same time. It taught me that two guitars playing together can be more powerful than one guitar playing faster. I spent a whole summer trying to get a friend to learn the harmony part with me. We never quite got it. We had a great summer anyway.
12. Tornado of Souls — Megadeth
Guitarist: Marty Friedman
Version: Hammersmith Apollo, London, 30 September 1992
Album: studio version on Rust in Peace (1990)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
Every guitar kid has a solo they use as a yardstick. For a lot of us in the early 2000s, it was this one.
Marty Friedman's solo in "Tornado of Souls" is fast, sure, but that's not why people worship it. It's because it's melodic at that speed. He bends notes in ways nobody else does, with a slightly exotic feel from his love of Japanese and Middle Eastern scales, so even the shred passages sound like singing. I spent close to a year on it. I can play about seventy percent of it now, on a good day, warmed up, with nobody watching. That's fine. Some mountains are just for climbing at, not over.
13. Always With Me, Always With You — Joe Satriani
Guitarist: Joe Satriani
Version: Live in San Francisco, 2000
Album: Live in San Francisco (2001); studio on Surfing with the Alien (1987)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
After Megadeth, I thought instrumental guitar music meant speed for its own sake. Satriani fixed that.
"Always With Me, Always With You" is a love song with no words. The melody is so simple you could hum it after one listen, and it's played with so much care that you don't need words. In the San Francisco show he leaves the melody almost untouched and only lets loose once the song has earned it. I put this on the night before a big exam, and the night after a breakup, and both times it was exactly what I needed. That's a strange thing to say about a song with no lyrics, but that's the point.
14. For the Love of God — Steve Vai
Guitarist: Steve Vai
Version: London Astoria, 6–7 December 2001
Album/Film: Live at the Astoria (2003); studio on Passion and Warfare (1990)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
Satriani's student, and the opposite end of the same idea. Vai doesn't just play the guitar. He makes it cry, laugh, scream and speak.
At the Astoria, with Billy Sheehan and Tony MacAlpine on stage with him, "For the Love of God" is almost seven minutes of controlled madness. There's a section where the whammy bar makes the notes sound like they're coming from somewhere far away, and then it comes back with something huge. When I first saw it, a friend and I watched it four times in a row on a tiny monitor and didn't say anything in between. It's the solo that made me accept that I'll never play like that, and somehow that was freeing.
Part III: The surprises (2005–2010)
15. My Sharona — The Knack
Guitarist: Berton Averre
Version: The full album version, 1979
Album: Get the Knack (1979)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
This one is on the list because it ambushed me.
Everyone knows the riff and the stutter. I knew it as a goofy party song. Then one day, in the YouTube rabbit-hole years around 2006, I listened to the full album version instead of the radio edit, and the solo just kept going. And it's composed. Every phrase builds on the one before, it has a beginning, a middle and a climax, and it lands right back in the riff like it was planned from the first note. Because it was.
Averre taught me that a solo doesn't need to be improvised to feel alive. Sometimes the most exciting thing is a solo that someone sat down and wrote like a song inside a song. The radio edit cuts most of it. Find the full one.
16. I'm So Afraid — Fleetwood Mac
Guitarist: Lindsey Buckingham
Version: Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, May 1997
Album: The Dance (1997); studio on Fleetwood Mac (1975)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
I thought I knew Fleetwood Mac. Soft rock, beautiful harmonies, "Dreams" on the radio. Nothing on the radio prepared me for this.
"I'm So Afraid" on The Dance starts dark and slow, Buckingham singing like a man who hasn't slept, and then he plays the solo, and it's one of the most unhinged, desperate things I've ever heard from a guitar. He plays with his fingers, no pick, snapping at the strings, and the solo keeps building past the point where you think it has to stop. His face is twisted, the band is locked in behind him, and he just won't let go of it.
I watched it on a friend's laptop and we both laughed at the end, the kind of nervous laugh you make after a near miss. It was the solo that taught me guitar playing isn't only about beauty or speed. Sometimes it's about saying the thing you're afraid to say out loud, and letting it be ugly if it has to be.
17. While My Guitar Gently Weeps — Prince
Guitarist: Prince
Version: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, New York, 15 March 2004
Album: live broadcast (George Harrison tribute)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
Somebody sent me the link with no context. Just: "watch till the end."
It's a George Harrison tribute: Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Harrison's son Dhani. Respectful, lovely. Prince is off to the side in a red hat for most of it, barely visible. Then, about three and a half minutes in, he steps forward, and for the next few minutes it's the most fearless guitar playing I've ever seen. He falls backwards off the stage mid-solo, gets caught, keeps playing, and at the end throws his guitar into the air. It never comes down on camera.
I've watched it probably a hundred times. It taught me the thing nobody teaches in lessons: confidence is part of the tone.
Part IV: Coming home (2008 onwards)
18. Gravity — John Mayer
Guitarist: John Mayer
Version: Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles, 8 December 2007
Album/Film: Where the Light Is (2008)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
If "Comfortably Numb" is the solo that showed me what the guitar is for, "Gravity" from Where the Light Is is the one I'd play to somebody if I only had five minutes to explain why I love it.
It's restraint, then release. Mayer plays so quietly at times that the crowd almost has to lean in, and then he bends a note that seems to go on forever, and the whole room breathes with him. There's Gilmour in it, and SRV, and Hendrix, all of it boiled down to a few notes that hurt in the right way. I bought a Strat partly because of this video. I'm still trying to get my bends to sound like his. Every guitarist my age probably is.
19. Technical Difficulties — Racer X
Guitarist: Paul Gilbert
Version: Live performance (video below)
Album: studio original on Technical Difficulties (1999)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
I heard this in 2009, and it felt like being hit by a train that was laughing at me.
I'd already been through Friedman, Vai and Satriani, so I thought I knew what fast sounded like. Then someone sent me a live clip of Racer X playing "Technical Difficulties," and Paul Gilbert started picking. It isn't just speed. It's precision at a speed that shouldn't allow precision: every note of those long runs perfectly clean, locked in unison with the band, the riff jumping between odd groupings like a puzzle he'd already solved and was now just showing off. And through all of it he looks like he's having the best time of anyone in the room.
That was the part that stayed with me. The shred players I'd grown up on often looked serious, almost pained. Gilbert played the hardest music I'd ever heard with a grin, like it was a joke he was letting us in on. I spent weeks with a metronome after that, trying to clean up my alternate picking, getting nowhere fast (and slowly). The song's title turned out to be the most honest description of my attempts. But it changed how I practised for good: slow, clean, then a little faster. And try to enjoy it.
20. Covered in Rain — John Mayer
Guitarist: John Mayer
Version: Oak Mountain Amphitheatre, Alabama, 12 September 2002
Album: Any Given Thursday (2003)
Listen: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
I came to this John Mayer track late, and suspiciously. The memory of this song is me riding my bicycle in Ottawa, April 2012, 2 PM on a Sunday, riding back from work, with my iPhone 4, caught in a drizzle, hoping the phone lasts, while having this song on repeat.
"Covered in Rain" on that record goes on for about ten minutes, and the second half is Mayer stretching out over a slow blues, completely unhurried, pulling ideas out of SRV and Hendrix and B.B. King and making them sound like him. It was the moment everything I'd learned from Part II came together in one player of my own generation. Here was someone only a few years older than me, doing what my heroes did, live, in a shed in Alabama. It made the whole thing feel possible again.
21. Cry for You — Andy Timmons
Guitarist: Andy Timmons
Version: Live, Andy Timmons Band
Album: studio original on Ear X-tacy (1994)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music (studio) · YouTube
By 2011 I was older, working, and listening to music more out of habit than hunger. Then one night, deep in a chain of YouTube recommendations, a live clip of a man in a plain T-shirt with a Strat-style guitar started playing, and within a minute I'd put down whatever I was doing.
"Cry for You" is an instrumental, and Andy Timmons plays it like a singer. The melody is simple and heartbreaking, and he never hides it under flash. Every note has a little shape to it: a slow bend, a touch of vibrato, a swell with the volume knob. When he finally opens up, it's fast and fluent, but it always comes back to that melody, like he can't bear to leave it for long.
What got me was how human it sounded. Here was someone with all the technique of the shredders I'd worshipped in Part II, choosing to sound like someone crying. I played it three times that night, then went and found Ear X-tacy and listened to the rest. It rekindled something I didn't know had gone quiet. After a decade of listening, it reminded me why I'd started.
22. Ode to a Sunny Day — Blackstratblues
Guitarist: Warren Mendonsa
Version: Live
Album: L.I/O.V.E. Vol. II (2023); studio original on The New Album (2009)
Listen: Spotify (studio) · Apple Music · YouTube
The last one is the most personal, and the one most people reading this won't have heard. I probably heard this in 2011 but the new version is sumptuous.
Blackstratblues is the instrumental project of Warren Mendonsa, an Indian guitarist with the most honest tone I have ever heard. I remember seeing him in a show in 1999 with Zero. Along with the legendary Sonam Sherpa, I rediscovered him long after all the others on this list, at a point when I thought my list of guitar heroes was finished. "Ode to a Sunny Day" is exactly what the title promises. It's warm, melodic and patient, and it has Knopfler's clarity, Gilmour's space and Mayer's blues, but it sounds like nobody but him.
It's here because it closed the loop. All those years of listening to legends from far away, on tapes, VHS, burned CDs and grainy YouTube clips, and then a guy from close to home picks up a black Strat and plays something that sounds like where I'm from. It reminded me that the people who influence us don't have to be on posters. Sometimes they're just a few cities away, playing on a sunny day.
What twenty-two solos taught me
Looking at this list now, I can see the shape of it. Gilmour, Knopfler and Mayer taught me phrasing and space. Hendrix and SRV taught me where it all came from. Page and Blackmore taught me that live is alive. Murray, Gers, Friedman, Hetfield and Slash taught me that heavy music can be melodic. Vai and Satriani showed me the ceiling, Paul Gilbert showed me that virtuosity can grin, and Prince showed me there isn't one. Averre taught me to compose, Buckingham taught me to let it hurt, Timmons taught me that a melody can carry everything, and Mendonsa brought it all home.
The five-year-old who heard Sabbath in 1992 had no idea any of this was coming. I'm glad he kept listening.
What's the solo that changed you? I'd genuinely like to know.
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