World peace, everlasting devotion and social strife provide the creative fuel for scores of history’s most beloved artists. But for many rock ‘n’ roll songwriters, the quest for a kiss is all the inspiration they really need.

As a storyteller, Katie Crutchfield has always made things personal. People and places populate her songs. As the following selections demonstrate, a spin through Waxahatchee’s catalog is like spinning a globe.

Matthew Caws’s relationship with Daniel Lorca dates back to when they attended a French boarding school in NYC. The multilingual musicians’ songbook shows that they’ll always love La République.

A teenaged Johnny Cash vowed he would marry June Carer one day. They met for the first time six years later, after she watched him make his debut at the Grand Ole Opry. They wed 12 years after that.

Since 2004, Nels Cline has been Wilco’s not-so-secret weapon. Now that he has been with the band for most of its existence, it’s not unreasonable to view Wilco’s history in terms of B.C. and A.C. - Before Cline and After Cline.

Three decades after the Stones got censored - with cultural upheavals like the Summer of Love, the rise of hip-hop and Limp Bizkit’s lewd existence occurring in the interim - The Strokes were sanitized… twice.

Dogma. Devotion. Enlightenment. All themes the three members of this Chvrch aim to conjure with their irreverent moniker. Inevitably, big concepts like these form the skeleton of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe. 

Weezer has 14 albums available on streaming platforms. If you include singles and alternate versions, that's a daunting list of tracks. There are a few missing, though. Here are six Weezer jams you won't find on Spotify.

Ride’s six full-lengths only tell half of the story. Their seven intervening EPs paint between the lines to showcase some of the Oxford quartet's greatest tunes. They also sport some of the band's most eye-catching cover art.

All 16 of Tom Petty’s studio albums feature Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, and all but one make room for piano man Benmont Tench. Three records in Petty’s discography, though, are billed as “solo” records. 

There’s no doubt that Adele prefers the impact of paramount quality over bottom-line-boosting quantity. Her trio of studio LPs over the past dozen years has yielded but a pair of cover songs. But what covers they are. 

The Great Escape may have signaled the end of “The Life Trilogy,” but if any album in the band’s catalog is such a grand getaway, it’s the self-titled 1997 follow-up that finally introduced Blur to the American mainstream.