Settling the Greatest Guitar Solo Debate

Or, just making you angrier

Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you enjoy this newsletter, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history. Now, let’s talk guitar solos.

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Settling the Greatest Guitar Solo Debate

By Chris Dalla Riva

Last week, Rolling Stone published their list of the 100 greatest guitar solos of all time. In some ways, it seems like a strange time to highlight godly guitar work. The guitar solo has not been prevalent in popular music for a while. In fact, last year when a reader asked me about guitar solos in contemporary pop songs, I could only come up with 9 examples from the last 15 years, including Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” and Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”

Nevertheless, if you’ve keep up with music press, you would assume that the guitar solo—and rock music generally—is healthier than it’s ever been.

• “In 2025,” The New York Times declared, “rock was still hanging in. As artificial intelligence infiltrates music, the genre’s handmade imperfections are more crucial than ever.”

• Luminate, the data analytics firm behind the Billboard charts, noted that rock was both the fastest growing genre and second most popular genre in the US last year.

• And just last week, Jacobin—the magazine I would probably turn to last for music criticism—published the ridiculous headline “Liberal Poptimists Tried to Kill Rock. They Failed.”

So, maybe Rolling Stone has their finger on the pulse. Maybe now is the time to be debating the flashiest and most tasteful work on the six-string. Here’s what the famed magazine put in their top ten:

1. “Purple Rain” by Prince (Guitarist: Prince)

2. “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix (Guitarist: Jimi Hendrix)

3. “Hotel California” by Eagles (Guitarists: Joe Walsh & Don Felder)

4. “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd (Guitarist: David Gilmour)

5. “Eruption” by Van Halen (Guitarist: Eddie Van Halen)

6. “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry (Guitarist: Chuck Berry)

7. “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin (Guitarist: Jimmy Page)

8. “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan (Guitarist: Larry Carlton)

9. “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic (Guitarist: Eddie Hazel)

10. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by The Beatles (Guitarist: Eric Clapton)

Beyond the fact that I’ve never loved Clapton’s solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” I don’t take issue with celebrating the guitar mastery heard on these songs. They all have great solos. Maybe you don’t think “Purple Rain” should be in the top spot, but it’s undoubtedly a great solo.

Because I am who I am, I did begin to wonder if there was a better way to measure guitaristic greatness beyond Rolling Stone’s opaque criteria:

We didn’t include any jazz … and a few entries are instrumentals … The criterion isn’t sales or airplay — just the six-string brilliance on display. We also took into account that the solo makes the song, and that it doesn’t just repeat the melody line. (A bonus: if you can sing it note-for-note.)

Let’s see what the data has to say about the topic.

What Solos do the People Want to Hear?

Had I worked on this project a few months ago, I would have turned to one of my favorite resources: Spotify. The Spotify API allows you to scan hundreds of playlists with a click. Just search for something like “greatest guitar solo” and aggregate all the songs people have added to related playlists.

There’s one problem. Because AI companies have been scraping every piece of information on the internet, the Spotify API—along with many other APIs—have been made all but useless.

Luckily, there are other options. Both YouTube Music and Deezer have accessible APIs. I applied the same methodology to those streaming services, namely searching for greatest guitar solo playlists and saw what listeners were adding.

17 of the most playlisted 20 songs on great guitar solo playlists are on Rolling Stone’s list. The three that listeners prefer to the folks at the magazine are “November Rain” by Guns N' Roses, “Floods” by Pantera, and “Mr. Crowley” by Ozzy Osbourne.

Things start to diverge outside the top 20, though. Only 45 of the 100 greatest guitar solos as determined by listener playlist adds are on the Rolling Stone list. Some of these differences are shocking. Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” comes in at number 43 on the list built from listener playlists. It’s absent from the Rolling Stone list.

Equally shocking is Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”—a song not found on the Rolling Stone list—coming in at number 22 on the list built from listener playlists. Does “Aqualung” have a guitar solo? Sure. But it’s not one of the first things that comes to my mind when I think of “Aqualung” as is the case with, say, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” For me, “Aqualung” is more defined by its brief twisting riff, creepy lyrics, and tempo changes.

But this highlights how tricky making these lists can be. Scores of people can say a guitar solo is generational when it’s not something I’ve given more than ten seconds of thought to.

Fans and Critics Unite!

Maybe my quantitative process and Rolling Stone’s opaque process both have their strengths and weaknesses. My approach, for example, has some bias toward popularity. Obscure but masterful solos, like “Marquee Moon,” will get overpowered by those solos heard on pop hits (e.g., “Beat It”). Critical lists, though they can sometimes feel like clickbait, give these smaller works a chance to shine.

Let’s bring the critics and the fans together. To do this, I supplemented Rolling Stone’s critical list with two others: Digital Dream Door and Guitar World. I then aggregated the top 100 solos based on Deezer and YouTube Music playlist adds. That gave me four lists of solos. Weighting by the rank on each list, I used these to create a master list of the greatest guitar solos.

Would this be my personal list of the greatest guitar solos of all-time? No. But if, like Rolling Stone, we ignore jazz, I think it’s a list that most people can get behind.

• Must-haves, like “Free Bird” and “Eruption,” dominate the top of the list.

• Notable masterpieces that you aren’t likely to hear on your local classic rock station, like “Cliffs of Dover” and “Maggot Brain,” also get some love.

• Plus, well-regarded solos that Rolling Stone didn’t heap praise on, like “Highway Star” and “Sultans of Swing,” inch their way up the list.

No, my list—nor any of these lists—will end barroom debates about shredding. But hopefully they inspire some fledgling artist to tack a guitar solo onto their latest creation. Even if rock music isn’t dead, it wouldn’t hurt if someone breathed life into the solo.

A New One
"Magic Man" by The Gones
2026 - Indie Rock

I’m sure someone who follows rock music more closely would tell me otherwise, but I found it very difficult to find a new-ish song with a guitar solo, especially one I thought was tasteful. Luckily, a few hours of digging turned up The Gnomes and their latest single, “Magic Man.”

While the riff in “Magic Man” feels like it’s descended from The Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” the rest of the song is gnarlier than anything the 1960s television band could turn out. More importantly, it’s got a guitar solo that is both flashy and tasteful.

An Old One
"Petite Etude" by Triumph
1981 - Baroque

Rik Emmett was a rare shredder from the 1980s who was much too good for his band. I don’t say that to rag on his band, Triumph, but Emmett’s guitar work was always leagues better than the Canadian group’s songs.

“Petite Etude” is one of the many songs in the Triumph catalog that shows Emmett’s range. No, he doesn’t whip out a hair metal-informed solo like he does on “Allied Forces” or “Spellbound.” On “Petite Etude” he turns to a nylon-stringed guitar for a minute of classical counterpoint that would leave Bach inspired.

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