Every Grammy Award winner for record of the year, ranked

Los Angeles Times

31-01-2025

What makes a record of the year? At the Grammy Awards, it can be a stunning performance or an ingenious production, a glimpse into the future or a glance at the past, a worldwide smash or an obscurity by a longtime fave. Ahead of Sunday's 67th Grammys, here's a ranked list of all 66 songs that have won record of the year since the Recording Academy's first ceremony in 1959. Arranged from worst to best, the rundown includes expert commentary from half a dozen previous winners: Sheryl Crow, Toto's Steve Lukather, producer Mark Ronson, Michael McDonald, Chic's Nile Rodgers and Charles Kelley of the country trio Lady A.
Over Barbra Streisand's 'Happy Days Are Here Again'?
Over Ray Charles' 'Georgia on My Mind'??
Over 'The Chipmunk Song'???
A posthumous win for Charles that you can scorn and sympathize with at the same time.
A record that already feels impossible to explain.
Likely drearier than you remember.
One reason to be happy that this perfectly ordinary folk-pop ditty won record and song of the year: the opportunity it gave Ol' Dirty Bastard to interrupt Colvin's song of the year speech to proclaim that 'Wu-Tang is for the children.'
Record of the year enters the MTV era.
Right singer, wrong song.
A dose of well-meaning reassurance in the wake of 9/11.
'He's one of the greatest jazz singers of all time — like Al Jarreau on steroids — and he wins for making some little f—ing novelty song,' Lukather says of McFerrin's a cappella chart-topper. 'Hit records are a blessing and a curse, man.'
'This is really embarrassing for me,' Eilish confessed as she picked up her second straight record of the year award — a prize the 19-year-old spent the rest of her speech saying should have gone to Megan Thee Stallion for 'Savage.' (She was probably right.) What's funny — and a little tragic — about the dreamy 'Everything I Wanted' is that it's more or less about trying to deflect praise like the academy's: 'If they knew what they said would go straight to my head,' Eilish sings, 'what would they say instead?'
Twelve months after Simon's 'Graceland' was named album of the year at the 1987 Grammys, still-besotted voters bestowed the LP's title track with the prize for record of the year.
More of a moral victory than a creative one.
A fine Green Day tune, but the band was more deserving of the record prize a year before with 'American Idiot,' which lost to that middling Charles/Jones duet. In 2006, there was no justifying 'Boulevard' over Mariah Carey's 'We Belong Together.'
An unimaginable horror leads to an inevitable win.
Natalie Cole's virtual duet with her late father could've been stiff, creepy or worse; somehow it ended up deeply endearing.
Among the records vanquished by Alpert's finger-snapping instrumental: the Beatles' 'Yesterday.' Says Lukather: 'It was all jazz guys voting back then — jazz and classical musicians. The Beatles were rock 'n' roll. There was no way they were gonna let those guys win.' Indeed, Bob Dylan's epochal 'Like a Rolling Stone' wasn't even nominated.
Light, lovely — and definitely not better than Joni Mitchell's 'Help Me,' which it nonetheless defeated.
Grammy voters can rarely resist an act's rededication to its fundamentals.
The most recent rock song to win record of the year, 'Use Somebody' beat both Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift in their first appearances in the category (with 'Poker Face' and 'You Belong With Me,' respectively). Said lead singer Caleb Followill as he and the rest of the band received their Grammy: 'I'm not gonna lie — we're all a little drunk.'
Ronson credits the 'Today' show's Hoda Kotb, of all people, for helping to break this future wedding-reception staple: 'She talked about it for like 20 minutes one morning — 'I love this Bruno Mars song' — and next thing I know, it shot into the top five on the iTunes Store. Then it didn't leave for six months.'
A bass line for the ages.
'Hey, Bonnie Raitt — I got one too.' That's how Midler, then 16 years past her first Grammy, accepted the final award of 1990's ceremony, not long after Raitt sealed a midlife comeback of her own with an album of the year win for 'Nick of Time.' As a piece of songwriting, Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar's 'Wind Beneath My Wings' is pretty drippy (which is probably why it also won song of the year). But Midler's vocal makes it soar.
Hooks on hooks on hooks.
Wanna feel old? Coldplay frontman Chris Martin used his acceptance speech to dedicate the British band's win to John Kerry, 'who hopefully will be your president one day.'
As pop songs titled 'Hello' go, Adele's comes in a close second after Lionel Richie's.
A slow-and-spooky goth-folk rendering of a tune Plant had written and recorded a decade earlier with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, 'Please Read the Letter' became a surprise-hit single from Plant and Krauss' surprise-hit 'Raising Sand,' which sold more than a million copies and brought the duo half a dozen Grammys overall. Lady A's Kelley, whose oldest brother had turned him on to Led Zep as a kid — 'He made me watch 'The Song Remains the Same,'' he says, 'and I was like, 'What the hell is this guy doing walking through the mountains with a sword?'' — brought 'Raising Sand' into the studio as he and the rest of Lady A were at work on their second LP. 'I remember playing it for them and going, 'Dude, listen to this s—.' It's got such a darkness. It was like the coolest freaking record I'd ever heard.'
'Drinks is on Silk Sonic tonight,' Anderson.Paak assured his competitors as he and Bruno Mars completed what he accurately termed a 'clean sweep' at the Grammys with this four-times-awarded throwback-soul joint.
Crisply harmonized yet legitimately trippy.
'The main thing they said to me is they wanted to make a record as if the internet never existed,' Rodgers recalls of the brief he received from the helmeted robots of France's Daft Punk. 'Most people wouldn't know how to interpret that. But musicians speak in an interesting language — what I call band-speak, B-A-N-D.' The result was a pristinely arranged Studio 54 homage with real blood in its veins.
Swoon.
Arguably the ne plus ultra of seafaring yacht rock, 'Sailing' 'just feels good — like a warm little blanket,' says Kelley, who leads a side-project cover band called Dick Fantastic & the Fabulous 4Skins that performs Cross' tune about letting the canvas do its miracles. Even so, Cross' unprecedented Grammy mop-up — in addition to record of the year, he won album and song of the year as well as best new artist — set him up for a rough ride as he tried to build a long-term career. 'Nobody knew what the kid looked like,' says his friend Lukather. 'He had a really tasty album with no pictures, and he won all these awards, then people expected John Travolta in his prime or something.'
A year after this placid soft-rock ballad brought Joel his first two Grammys — it also won song of the year — Sinatra released a ring-a-ding rendition of the tune with a completely different emotional approach. 'I didn't care how he did it as long as he did it,' Joel told The Times in 2017. 'Twist it into a pretzel if you want.'
'I don't know if he's the most soulful white guy, but he's certainly on the Mt. Rushmore,' Ronson says of the English singer who did time in the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith before striking out on his own. 'When music got very slick and expensive-sounding in the late '80s, he always walked the right side of the line: You could hear the $200,000 Synclavier, but the grooves and arrangements were so clever and intricate. And the message of 'Higher Love' — it's got something really honest and earnest in it.'
She came in like a disco ball.
Ol' Blue Eyes at perhaps his most elegantly pugnacious.
Said Seal in an interview with The Times in 2023: 'I'm not by any means the world's greatest singer, but I have a thing that I do, and 'Kiss From a Rose' is a showcase of that.'
It makes zero sense that the great Kenny 'Babyface' Edmonds had to wait to win record of the year until he produced this acoustic roots-soul jam that Clapton cut for the soundtrack to 1996's 'Phenomenon' (in which Travolta plays a small-town mechanic who … turns into a genius after being struck by lightning?). That said, 'Change the World' cooks, not least because of the rub between Babyface's luscious groove and Clapton's well-creased vocal. Says Crow, who reportedly dated Clapton in the late '90s: 'It's like Bonnie and 'Nick of Time' — these people who've lived a full life and then sing a song that cauterizes itself in a moment.'
A quirky alt-pop success story with a title that proved all too apt.
'One take with a live band' is how Jones described her breakout single to The Times last year — both a flex regarding her natural vocal finesse and an understatement of her and producer Arif Mardin's record-making acumen.
Guess who's back again?
You know it from that opening drum hit.
Fourteen years later, Kelley still can't believe his Nashville trio's power ballad beat Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' 'Empire State of Mind,' which he thinks might have lost only as a result of vote-splitting between it and Eminem's 'Love the Way You Lie.' Yet Kelley and his bandmate Hillary Scott captured an ache in 'Need You Now' that transcends genre. 'It's almost an R&B song,' Crow says. 'The yearning in her voice — it's too good.'
The rough edges of her singing against the rough edges of the drums.
Benson was already one of Rodgers' two favorite guitarists (along with Wes Montgomery) when the former cut a swank version of Leon Russell's 'This Masquerade,' in which he also took lead vocal. 'I thought I would drop dead,' Rodgers says, comparing his reaction to the first time he heard John Coltrane sing on 'A Love Supreme.' 'Benson's voice is magical, man — next-level beautiful.'
Hey, hey, hey.
Flack became the first artist to win record of the year twice in a row when this vivid account of a pop-star encounter took the prize after her earlier victory with 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.'
Wistfulness embodied.
Crow triangulates the sound among Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan and Stealers Wheel; she says the lyric illustrates 'the burnout of somebody sitting in a bar across from a car wash.' She didn't plan to put it on her debut album, 'Tuesday Night Music Club,' until she sent her brother a pre-release cassette. 'I told him I thought it was a B-side, and he was like, 'Are you kidding me? That's your big song.' He was right, of course: Now I hear it on the radio, and it still sounds so good.'
Too big to fail.
The first recipient of the Grammys' coveted best new artist award (which wasn't presented until the ceremony's second edition), 23-year-old Darin doubled up with a record of the year win for his chart-topping take on the murder ballad from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 'Threepenny Opera.' 'The way he swung it and sang it with a smile on his face was just genius,' says McDonald, who calls himself a 'huge, huge fan of Bobby Darin, and for the same reason that I'm a fan of Ray Charles and Nat Cole and Frank Sinatra: the confidence that they could take a song from one musical approach and completely re-create it in another.' Grammy voters loved 'Mack the Knife' so much that they nominated Ella Fitzgerald's interpretation for record of the year in 1961.
It took the Grammys until after the Summer of Love to fully acknowledge that pop music had moved beyond the crooners and show tunes of the show's early days. Voters in '68 didn't just go for this lightly psychedelic flight of fancy — they also gave the Beatles their first (and only) album of the year award for 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Says Rodgers of 'Up, Up and Away,' for which Jimmy Webb also took song of the year: 'I love the fact that the 5th Dimension were Black and that they represented a different style from what we considered at that time the typical R&B type of vocalizing.'
Among the musicians who didn't vote to nominate Toto's 'Rosanna,' according to Lukather: the members of Toto, none of whom had yet joined the academy when the L.A. band earned a nod for record of the year with this exceedingly crafty studio-geek classic. 'Once we found out, they wouldn't let us join until after the Grammys because obviously we would've voted for ourselves,' Lukather says. 'People can lie and say they don't do that. They do.'
No less a logistical feat than an artistic achievement, the charity single to end all charity singles plays today like a handmade supercut of '80s-era extravagance.
'We wanted it to sound like one of the great old records from the '60s,' McDonald says, which led the Doobies to 'go out and get a piece of plywood because we'd heard that Bob Gaudio had done that on some Four Seasons stuff. We came back and mic'd up the plywood and just stomped four on the floor behind the track.'
A high point for polished yet hirsute L.A. rock: The Eagles' Hollywood phantasmagoria is named record of the year the same night Fleetwood Mac wins the album prize with the darkly glittering 'Rumours.'
So thoroughly did King dominate the '72 Grammys (where she won four major awards) that her competition for record of the year included herself: Up against this wise and jazzy breakup tune was her pal James Taylor's soothing rendition of King's 'You've Got a Friend.'
McDonald hears Turner's comeback smash — the one that launched her as a superstar solo act after she left an abusive marriage to her longtime musical partner Ike — as a testament to her perseverance. 'I don't know who else could deliver that message the way Tina did,' he says. 'From anyone else, the song might've just sounded cynical. With her, it took on a kind of profound meaning.'
'It's still the high-water mark for a heavy electric guitar over a dance-pop beat,' Ronson says of Jackson and producer Quincy Jones' crack at creating a rock song for the world-conquering 'Thriller' LP. (That's Lukather on rhythm guitar and Eddie Van Halen on the solo.) Reckons Crow, who got her start in the music biz as a backup singer for Jackson on tour behind 'Bad': 'There's no one that doesn't know that song.'
Not a single note is out of place.
Gilberto's first recorded vocal performance — cut, as she told it, at the suggestion of her husband, Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto — crystallized an idea of pop sophistication that made her an instant star and helped send the sound of bossa nova around the world.
The 'duh' still kills.
Ten pounds of attitude in a five-pound bag, Winehouse's signature song is hard for Ronson to hear these days, given the dark turn the singer's life took not long after it came out. Yet the song was born as the two joked around while walking through New York City. 'She was like, 'There was this time my dad came over trying to make me go to rehab, and I said, 'No, no, no,''' Ronson recalls. 'The way she said it, it had its own hook and rhythm to it. The song was done in about a week. We were just going on instinct.'
One of those songs you can't quite believe didn't exist at one point.
'There's no other record where somebody put on a better performance than 'I Will Always Love You,'' Babyface told The Times in 2022, and it's hard to disagree as Houston's vocal rolls over you in all its splendor and precision. But the finest recording by pop's greatest ballad singer is also a story about Houston's lifelong drive to bring herself into being. It's high on possibility and haunted by loss.