In a wonderful book dedicated to music lovers everywhere, Tim Morse’s Classic Rock Stories explores the tales behind the great songs—how they were written, who inspired them, and what the artists were feeling when those first sparks of music took shape.

“Mary’s a girlfriend of mine,” explained Jimi Hendrix about The Wind Cries Mary (1967). “She tells the most nice stories to me. One time she tells me I’m an animal and another time she says I’m a kind of good to her.” In Morse’s hands, even a passing remark becomes a glimpse into the heart behind a song.

About Our House (1970), written by Joni Mitchell, his lover at the time, Graham Nash said, “I felt very warm and felt like I’d really found a home… I had never been with a woman like Joan. I had never been so much in love.” One simple morning—flowers, a fire in the grate, light in the rooms—became a song that still feels like comfort.

Born to Run (1975) was written by Bruce Springsteen in New York, for a girlfriend who was homesick for Texas. “I’d come home practically in tears,” he said. “And I was sort of into that thing of being nowhere. But knowing that there is something someplace.” Out of restlessness and longing came an anthem of escape, hope, and the wide-open road.

Eric Clapton, in love with George Harrison’s wife Patti, wrote Layla (1970). “It was actually about an emotional experience—a woman I felt deeply about who turned me down, and I had to pour it out in some way,” he said. “The greatest things you do are always done by mistake, accidentally. I had no idea what Layla was going to be.”

As Classic Rock Stories unfolds, the songs we cherish begin in deep, complicated feelings. Inspiration appears in heartbreak and homesickness, in a quiet room filled with light and flowers, in the courage to turn private pain into music that finds its way into our hearts.