Since You Been Gone

There's a strange alchemy in how this song became a massive pop-rock hit while being, at its core, a technically ferocious piece of playing. The hook is undeniable — immediate, earworm-efficient, the kind of chorus that arrives and you realize you already knew it somehow — but what surrounds it is more interesting than the song's radio reputation suggests. Roger Glover's bass has genuine pulse beneath the surface sheen, and Blackmore's rhythm guitar is tighter and more percussive than his usual flowing style, almost funk-influenced in its choppiness. Cozy Powell's drums swing rather than bludgeon. And then the solos hit, and suddenly you remember you're listening to one of rock's most gifted technicians pretending, with enormous success, to write bubblegum. Graham Bonnet's vocal is cleanly delivered, almost pop-smooth, which creates the tension that makes the song work — that polished surface over the barely-controlled engine beneath. This is a breakup song for people who don't want to wallow, who prefer to turn grief into kinetic energy and drive it somewhere loud. It belongs on any list of songs that somehow managed to be both genuinely good and enormously popular, a trick harder to pull off than it appears.