Phil Collins is an international treasure. He’s also as nice as they come. I found this out firsthand when I met the world-renowned singer, songwriter, drummer and producer in his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City in 2016. I was there to discuss his then-upcoming solo-album reissues for a weekly music column I was writing for Digital Trends, and at the stroke of noon, Collins’s ever-affable manager ushered me into the room.
The former Genesis front man and blockbuster solo artist was typing furiously on his phone, but he smiled and said he’d be right with me. “Sorry, your meter hasn’t started yet,” he added with a self-aware chuckle. Type, type, type. “All right! Make yourself feel at home!” As I settled into my seat, Collins leaned forward, looked me right in the eyes and said, “Can I just say how nice it is to do an interview with someone in person? I’ve been talking on the phone all morning. It drives me nuts, really.”
And that’s Collins in a nutshell: easily relatable and utterly human, even after more than five decades in the spotlight and eight Grammys, six Brit Awards, an Academy Award for Best Original Song and many other well-deserved nods under his suspenders (er, belt).
You may have heard that the British-born Collins, who just turned 75 on Jan. 31, 2026, has been battling some serious health issues in recent years, including knee pain and kidney problems. He told the BBC that he now has 24-hour live-in care—but as always, Collins’s fighting spirit shines its light on everything he does. That’s why I felt it was high time to take a deep look at his life’s work.
Ahead, I’ve zeroed in on Collins’s top 10 songs—not an easy feat, mind you, but as a fan who bought Genesis’s Duke on vinyl the day it was released in March 1980, I feel quite up to the task. My list is effectively a 60/40 split of tracks from his uber-successful solo career and his long tenure as a member of Genesis. The main criterion is that the songs had to have been written primarily by Collins himself, so you won’t find any of the many Genesis tracks credited to other songwriters in the band—sorry, “Follow You, Follow Me.”
Are you ready? With a nod to a Collins album title: Hello, we must be going … to the top 10 song list of the legendary Phil Collins.
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more music, humor, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.
10. “Another Day in Paradise”
Album: …But Seriously
Released: 1989
This No. 1 single is a poignant look at social injustice—in this case, homelessness, a subject Collins had previously tackled in earnest in the 1983 Genesis song “Man on the Corner” (which just missed making this list by a whisker). “Another Day in Paradise” also rightly garnered Collins the 1991 Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
The instrumentation is minimal, led by Collins’s memorable keyboard hook, a drum machine pattern that ’80s music aficionados will immediately recognize and session musician Dominic Miller’s classical guitar lines. The distinct harmony vocals on the choruses (and some of the verses) were provided by David Crosby. You can hear Collins returning the favor on Crosby’s touching 1993 solo track, “Hero,” for which he co-wrote the lyrics and sang along with his dear friend “Croz.”
9. “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”
Album: Invisible Touch
Released: 1986
As sunny as Collins can be as a songwriter, he’s also quite adept at accessing the inner recesses of his darker side—something that’s well in evidence throughout this nine-minute song from Invisible Touch, Genesis’s bestselling album to date. It sold 6 million copies in the U.S. alone, and the musicianship is so good that you never actually want to leave its wake.
A foreboding tale of a struggling drug addict, “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” unfurls and expands at its own pace, a Genesis hallmark that the band—by now pared down to Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist Mike Rutherford—had perfected on earlier musically adventurous tracks like “Los Endos,” “Abacab” and “In the Cage.” An early proponent of the cutting-edge drum-machine technology heard here, Collins masterfully builds to his wailing plea: “Please get me out of here!”
8. “Both Sides of the Story”
Album: Both Sides
Released: 1993
Sometimes, a solo album really must be performed solo. Such is the case with 1993’s Both Sides, an album for which Collins played every instrument himself. Created in the slipstream of his second divorce, Both Sides mainly revisits the stark pain of a breakup and its ensuing aftermath, a subject Collins had perfected on his 1981 solo debut, Face Value.
“Both Sides of the Story,” the album’s opener, makes this list because it’s a top-shelf example of how Collins remained creatively viable in one of his later periods. While the song is a broad-based character study, an overarching interpersonal lament remains relatively front and center (Collins told me that the story behind “Story” was, and I quote: “personal”).
The backing track is almost counterintuitively upbeat—with lilting, Scottish-influenced keyboard riffs and his signature aggressive drum patterns—before coming back to earth with the opening line, “Find yourself in the gutter in a lonely part of town.”
7. “No Son of Mine”
Album: We Can’t Dance
Released: 1991
Another long song, the six-minute “No Son of Mine” is the best example of a veteran band in tune with one another and firing on all cylinders. It appears on the final Genesis studio album (to date).
“I’m really proud of that song,” Collins told me when we spoke. “There was a lot more of me in that album lyrically. I wrote lyrics for about eight of those songs, which was unheard of. I think by that point, the guys realized that I could do this.”
Opening with ticking-clock drum taps, smoky keyboards and a recurrent, caterwauling guitar line, “No Son” follows an abusive relationship between a son and a father. Collins’s cymbal playing during the back half of the track, also emphasized during the chorus, is—to use a nontechnical term—palpable.
6. “Easy Lover”
Album: Chinese Wall (Philip Bailey album)
Released: 1984
Collins, the expert collaborator, was perfectly in sync with Earth, Wind and Fire vocalist Philip Bailey on this massive hit, originally found on Bailey’s 1984 solo album Chinese Wall (which was produced by Collins). Later, it showed up on Collins’s compilations, including 1998’s …Hits and 2016’s The Singles. As it should—this song was big, selling over a million copies in the U.S. and topping the charts in multiple countries.
The mid-’80s ubiquity of Collins’s sound was so prevalent at that moment in time that as soon as the opening drums enter the track, you knew exactly who was playing them. Bailey and Collins, who wrote “Easy Lover” together along with bassist Nathan East, sing in harmonious tandem on the opening verses, then trade joyous leads throughout the rest of the song.
“Easy Lover” is so infectious and so undeniably, gosh-darn great that it is the exception to this list’s “solo songwriting” rule.
5. “Misunderstanding”
Album: Duke
Released: 1980
“Misunderstanding” represents a nexus point in Collins’s career, when he began to get more direct in his songwriting with Genesis. “Most of the [Genesis] lyrics were suggestions, ideas or ‘what if’ songs,” Collins confirmed to me. “They weren’t personal songs.” That changed when his first marriage ended in the late 1970s—and once he began opening up as a writer, the faucet was hard to turn off.
“It’s what you think, what you feel and what you believe about what’s happening to you,” he said. “To me, surely, that’s the way you write songs.” Indeed it is—and unlike the song’s famous chorus, there was no “kind of mistake” regarding the appeal of “Misunderstanding,” which made it all the way to No. 14, then the highest-charting single for Genesis at that point in their career.
Given the sunny, Beach Boys–esque vibe of the music (with Collins “woo-oo-ooing” between most lines on the verses) and the instant sing-along nature of the choruses, it’s easy to understand why this one leaves such a lasting impression.
4. “Take Me Home”
Album: No Jacket Required
Released: 1985
There could almost be a 10-way tie here, given all the great songs on Collins’s 12-million-selling third solo album, No Jacket Required, but the plaintive, meditative travelogue that closes the record takes the prize. (It also benefits from a well-loved music video that shows Collins singing the song at locales across the globe.)
Ostensibly about the mindset of a mental institution patient, “Take Me Home” is buoyed by the blended backing vocals from his former bandmate Peter Gabriel (who left Genesis in 1974, leading Collins to ultimately take his place fronting the band), Helen Terry (best known for her work singing with Culture Club) and Sting (you know, Sting).
Not only that, but “Take Me Home” has long found a niche in popular culture, appearing in everything from hip-hop samples and soul remakes to the interstitial music before the fourth quarter of 2025 NFL games on ESPN’s Monday Night Football.
3. “Mama”
Album: Genesis
Released: 1983
“Mama” may be the grittiest track Genesis ever recorded. You can practically feel the grime dripping into the grooves as this six-minute album-opening cut unfolds. The guttural drum-machine intro, menacing synth backing, searing guitar riffs and Collins’s reverb-laden lead vocals set the tone, all of it as sinister and downright creepy as can be.
Genesis was quite adept at using the technology of the times, and once again, the three-man group deployed a drum machine and multiple synthesizers to much aplomb. Also note that it takes a full 3 1/2 minutes before those powerful drums enter the song, coming in right after the repeated line, “Can’t you feel my heart?”
Oh, and that signature “heh-heh, hah! [pause] Owwh” growl of his? Collins confirmed with me that he was indeed inspired by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s groundbreaking 1982 hip-hop single, “The Message,” something he first revealed in the 2014 Genesis documentary, Sum of All the Parts.
2. “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)”
Album: Against All Odds soundtrack
Released: 1984
Collins’s heartfelt balladry has long been a benchmark of his career—see “Separate Lives,” “Hold on My Heart” and “One More Night,” just to name a few—but nothing touches the heartstrings or wrenches the soul quite as effectively as “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now).” The title track for Against All Odds, the Taylor Hackford–directed 1984 film about star-crossed lovers played by Rachel Ward and Jeff Bridges, was built from another song that Collins had never finished, titled “How Can You Just Sit There?”
Collins’s vocal performance is absolutely gut-wrenching here, culminating in his extended exclamation of the vowel sound in the “I’ll” contraction in the phrase, “’cause I’ll still be standing here.” If you’ve never shed a tear (or 10) while listening to “Against All Odds” at top volume on headphones, you may need to get your emotional wellspring checked.
1. “In the Air Tonight”
Album: Face Value
Released: 1981
Was there ever really any doubt? The most ominous entry in his vast catalog, “In the Air Tonight” represents everything Phil Collins is about—sharp songwriting chops, a keen sense of how to build drama and tension, a dramatic and forceful instrumental payoff and a seething chorus you simply cannot get out of your head.
Oh, and for all you air drummers out there, that above-noted power-payoff occurs at 3:16 in the song—that’s the moment when the drum-kit thunder erupts immediately after Phil’s somber voice intones, “The hurt doesn’t show, but pain still grows / It’s no stranger to you and me.”
As Collins told me in 2016, when he played “Air” in the studio for the first time for his close friend Eric Clapton and some other fellow musicians, they were totally flabbergasted. “When the drums came in, everybody said, [expletive]! What is that? Nobody had ever heard anything like that before,” Collins recalled. “Frankly, drums were never that loud. But it was my album, and it worked.”
I asked him why it worked so well: “We were playing with psychological things,” he replied. “The audience is there going along with you, and then suddenly, you knock them on the head with this thing: BOOM!” We still feel that boom today.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Digital Trends: “Phil Collins is bringing back his best, and he’s OK with you air drumming along”
- CNN: “Phil Collins says he has 24-hour live-in nurse care, as he details health struggles”
- American Songwriter: “How ‘Misunderstanding’ by Genesis Introduced Phil Collins’ Songwriting Gifts”
The post The Top 10 Songs from Rock Legend Phil Collins, Ranked appeared first on Reader's Digest.
from Reader's Digest https://ift.tt/bTvpam6
Comments
Post a Comment