‘Wonderwall,’ ‘Supersonic,’ ‘Live Forever,’ More

The brothers really leaned into their love-slash-aping of the Beatles in this Be Here Now wanderer, a nearly 10-minute (!) saga that would have fit nicely on the Fab Four’s Magical Mystery Tour. Is it unnecessarily long? Absolutely. But it’s irresistible, from Liam’s signature delivery of “shiiine” and some catchy “na-na-na’s” to those immersive strings. Eight years after its release, “All Around the World” took a second trip when AT&T used it in a TV commercial. —J.H.

Oasis charged into the new millennium with big-man-with-a-fork-in-a-world-of-soup energy. The Britpop empire was in decline. Electronic rock was on the rise. And “Go Let It Out” was the sound of the Gallaghers raging against the dying of the Nineties light. As Liam proclaimed, “We’re a fucking great band, and I think people will finally realize it with this album.” Their first single of the 2000s builds around a drum-and-bass groove and societal grievances. “Is it any wonder why princes and kings are clowns that caper in their sawdust rings?” Noel ponders. Translation: “The chorus is about how, in England, we’re quite fascinated with why famous people act like absolute knobheads.” —S.G.

Though it never appeared on an Oasis album, Noel Gallagher is clearly proud of this fierce 2007 single. And while Oasis never performed it live, he’s played it as a solo artist. You can see why he loves the song: “Lord Don’t Slow Me Down” is a mod-rock thunderbolt, mashing up the Who, the Kinks, and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, with a searing riff, some over-the-top Keith Moon-style drumming, and a desperate Noel vocal. The demo with Liam singing might even be a little more frenzied. Maybe they never played it live because they couldn’t decide who does it better. —J.D.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Definitely, Maybe, Oasis just released a rare version of “Sad Song” with a very young-sounding Liam on lead vocals. But we’re still partial to the Noel version of this ballad, which was originally only available in the U.K., Japan, and France. It’s everything Noel does well: forlorn lyrics (“we cheat and we lie/nobody says it’s wrong/so we don’t ask why”) sung in his plaintive keen over simple acoustic guitar. For a band that’s known for being brash and loud, “Sad Song” is subdued elegance. —J.H.

Like their idols the Beatles, Oasis’s B-sides often rivaled their singles, and “Half the World Away” is a great example of that. Released in 1994 as the flip to “Whatever,” and later on The Masterplan, this poignant tune is beloved precisely because it’s so unassuming. “It’s about desperately trying to leave the situation you’re in, dreaming of somewhere else, leaving the house, leaving the city,” Noel said. He wrote it in Vegas, “pinching” the country-western chords from Burt Bacharach’s swinging “This Guy’s in Love With You” and then drizzled in his own Mancunian melancholy. Noel saw the song as dark and depressing, but fans heard the band capturing that weird paradox of growing up: the conflicting desires to leave and to stay. —S.G.

Back in 1995, when Noel was coming up with more good songs than he knew what to do with, “Round Are Way” — its title a Slade-ian misspelling of the Mancunian expression for “in our neighborhood” — was one of three tracks consigned to the B-side of “Wonderwall.” Essentially an update of Madness’s “Our House,” this merrily nostalgic ode to growing up in the Manchester suburb of Burnage features a stomping glam-rock beat, “Got to Get You into My Life”-like horns, burning blues harp from Nine Below Zero’s Mark Feltham, and evocative lyrics about naughty paperboys and 25-a-side football matches. “Round Are Way” is still rightly hailed as one of Oasis’ finest non-album tracks. —D.E.

In the end, Liam got the last word. “Soldier On” closes out 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul — the last Oasis album before Noel’s departure. Liam’s voice cuts through the distortion and haze, tired but unyielding, like a war-weary soldier dragging his boots to the next battlefield. There is something ironic — and fitting — about Oasis ending their album with this abstract anti-anthem: “Soldier On” plods along with an eerie omniscience. It refuses to reach for the melodic grandeur of Oasis’s biggest hits, and because of that resistance, comes off mightier and more powerful for it. Liam’s vocals settle into the sludge, with uncomfortably calm resolve: “Hold the line, friend of mine, sing a song,” he intones, defiant, beaten down, and somehow still hanging on. —S.G.

This is Liam’s shining moment on an album he claims to have no recollection of ever making: “I didn’t like the title either. Heathen Chemistry? Fuck off.” “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” is the sound of Oasis testing out how their Britpop bravado translated into the self-conscious swamp of rock in the early 2000s. The song’s bittersweet message resonated with a world in mourning after the 9/11 attacks, and it was an overdue commercial win as their post-Nineties popularity waned. Also, in classic Oasis form, the song’s emotional gravitas was inspired by football, brilliantly timed to coincide with the 2002 World Cup and what the band knew would be England’s inevitable departure from the tournament. “We thought ‘We [England] are bound to get knocked out to this’ – ‘Kerching,’ I said,” Noel recalled. —S.G.

By their fourth album, Oasis was so exhausted they couldn’t even be bothered with singular/plural agreements on the title Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. “Sunday Morning Call” is both an audio and metaphorical comedown from the raw nasal passages of the psychedelic coke-fest that was Be Here Now. Noel was now in his early thirties, had a child, and was coming to the realization that he was not actually gonna live forever. Liam isn’t listed on the song’s credits. Though it’s a great album track, the band’s decision to release it as a single was a level of bananas only matched by the fact this melancholy dirge made it to Number Four in England. —S.R.

Recorded during the Be Here Now sessions, “Going Nowhere” was inexplicably only released as a B-side to “Stand by Me.” The song has a “welcome to stardom, all the exits are sealed” bleakness to it: Noel sounds like a recently rich person who feels hemmed in by his wealth as he sings, “I’m gonna get me a motor car/Maybe a Jaguar,” one of the best/worst lyrics in the catalog. “Going Nowhere” suggests things are bad, but soon they will get worse, with a brackish Bacharach sound that only adds to the sense of gilded melancholy. It’s an admirably dark sentiment composed by a man blinded by the snow. —S.R.

The third single from 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul, “Falling Down” was also the last Oasis single to come out before their August 2009 breakup. Reaching Number 10 on the U.K. singles charts that spring, the song enjoyed additional pop-culture cachet thanks to being featured as the opening theme of the Japanese anime TV series Eden of the East. Between Noel’s dreamy lead vocals, the propulsive groove, the airy acoustic guitars, and the psychedelic mellotron flourishes, “Falling Down” effectively previews the direction he would take with his next band, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. —D.E.

One of Noel’s most biting vocals, this prescient ballad about a relationship that crashes and burns appeared on 2000’s unfairly maligned Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. “Where Did It All Go Wrong?” is the clear highlight, a concise slice of dread and regret pushed along by Alan White’s drumbeat and some foreboding keys by Noel, who played everything but percussion on the track. “I hope you know/that it won’t let go/it sticks around with you until the day you die,” he wails in the chorus, before throwing up his hands to ask, “Where did it all go wrong?” —J.H.

A wistful gem from 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul, “I’m Outta Time” peaked at Number 12 on the U.K. charts, making it the first Oasis single since 1994’s “Shakermaker” to fall short of the Top 10. Perhaps the lack of the band’s trademark boldness had something to do with it: Even without the John Lennon interview snippet that closes the song, the moody and introspective “I’m Outta Time” feels more like an outtake from Lennon’s bread-baking years than the work of one of Britain’s brashest rock outfits. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty wonderful, with Liam’s remarkably subtle vocal performance serving as the track’s centerpiece. —D.E.

The best Kinks song Ray Davies never wrote, “The Importance of Being Idle” is all jaunty strums and cheeky lyrics about reveling in doing absolute fuck-all. (“A man’s got a limit/I can’t get a life if my heart’s not in it.”) A standout track from 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth, “Importance” was the second Noel-sung Oasis single to top the U.K. charts, after “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” It was also the band’s 19th straight U.K. Top 10 hit — breaking a record for groups previously held by the Beatles and ABBA — and their final U.K. Number One. —D.E.

“Songbird” came out of nowhere, Liam’s first composition on an Oasis record. Oasis proudly ripped off McCartney/Lennon at every turn, but where Noel has always been more of a Magical Mystery Tour/Sgt. Pepper’s guy, “Songbird” has an immediacy that’s closer to Help!, popping right out of the speakers. It’s all riff, no noodling. Liam’s “cut to the chase” attitude is a trademark of his post-Oasis solo career, which, remarkably, rivals Noel’s in quality and sales. “Songbird” made it clear that no matter what happened with Oasis, Liam was not going to just fade away. —S.R.

Be Here Now’s anchor, this top-tier ballad opens with one of Noel’s most matter-of-fact lyrics: “Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday,” a reference to a bout of food poisoning he claimed to have experienced. But even that profane description is loaded with emotion thanks to Liam’s extraordinary delivery, which builds to the yearning plea of the chorus: “Stand by me/nobody knows the way it’s gonna be.” For a laugh, check out the version from the live album Familiar to Millions, during which Liam chastises production for blinding him with a spotlight: “Get that light off me!” —J.H.

Any Oasis song that gives Liam an opportunity to sing the words “high” and “sunshine” is a good one, even if the title of this Heathen Chemistry single is a little questionable. It sure does rock, though, and stands as one of the group’s most attitude-heavy tracks of the 2000s. “I do believe I got flair/I got speed and I walk on air,” Liam boasts in the first verse, immediately reminding those who may have forgotten that he is very much a rock ‘n’ roll star. —J.H.

The longtime Noel joke here has been that Lyla, the focus of this single from 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth, is the sister of Sally from “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” the fun, mindless kind of fan trivia that mixes Oasis lore and timelines. But allusions aside, the song’s standout element is its massive, open-air stadium-rock quality — all crashing guitars and soaring vocals, plus percussion that notably marks the debut of Ringo Starr’s son Zak Richard Starkey, who’d played with the Who before replacing drummer Alan White. The result is among the most upbeat, pop-oriented cuts in the band’s catalog, to the point where Noel has called it “a song for pogoing.” —J.L.

The second single Oasis ever released, 1994’s “Shakermaker” was also the first of several songs to get the band in legal hot water over Noel’s “magpie” tendencies, as its melody bore an uncanny resemblance to the early-seventies Coca-Cola jingle “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”. Though the song was a Number 11 hit in the U.K., thanks to its grinding guitars and Liam’s deliciously sneering lead vocal, Oasis saw little in the way of net profit from it. A plagiarism lawsuit from Coke led the band to eventually settle for a reported half a million dollars. —D.E.

Noel Gallagher gave one of his sweetest mock-McCartney melodies to this Morning Glory gem, and Liam played along, trading in his usual sneer for an endearing falsetto on the chorus. If the singles from Oasis’ second album showed how huge they could get, this album cut — not a big ballad or a grandiose rocker, just a bit of tender nonsense about a girl, her brother, her mother, and her dozen cousins — showed that they had a surprisingly twee side, too. And if they straight-up lifted the outro from “With a Little Help from My Friends,” well, sometimes love is theft. —S.V.L.

Oasis have taken their Beatles obsession to logical conclusions with numerous covers — they somehow made “Octopus’s Garden” tolerable — but we’re partial to this live staple, which hardcore fans have long gravitated toward. Tempos are accelerated. Layered guitars give a Wall of Sound feel to the production. And you get to hear the rare-ish “Liam falsetto.” To be fair, “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun” could easily be an Oasis lyric. —J.N.

Following a catastrophic, meth-fueled “performance” at the Whisky a Go Go during Oasis’ first U.S. tour in 1994, Noel Gallagher quit the band and flew to San Francisco, hell-bent on leaving for good. He turned to a woman he’d met backstage at a show and sat in her apartment in complete distress, all while she just listened late into the night. Afterwards, he wrote “Talk Tonight,” a moving example of the Gallagher sneer morphing into tender sincerity as the acoustic cut whittles the band’s usual vigor to pure, aching vulnerability. It’s easily one of the band’s best B-sides — an unvarnished ode to having someone there for you during your worst low. —J.L.

“Hey, stay young, and invincible!” Liam commands in this two-finger salute to growing up and getting old. But even though the frontman sells the appeal of youth perfectly, it’s never been enough for Noel, who has said he dislikes the song. In fact, after writing it for Be Here Now, he sacked it and stuck it on the “D’You Know What I Mean?” single as a B-side. Fans remain glad this lyrical cousin to “Live Forever” exists at all. —J.H.

“All your dreams are made/When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade,” Liam yammers on “Morning Glory,” a high-flying screed about the dark side of cocaine addiction that was just a smidge on the hypocritical side coming from the Gallagher boys in 1995. The song lands somewhere between R.E.M.’s Document and the Beatles’ Revolver, the kind of off-handedly brilliant rock & roll mix and match Oasis effortlessly pulled off time and again. The guitars sound like they’ve been up doing rails all night too, wailing and rattling and punching the sky. —J.D.

“Don’t Go Away” cuts through the cocaine glaze and manic excess of Be Here Now for a moment of heartfelt beauty — a big, pretty mid-tempo song about trying to make sense of personal loss. The band had the song around since its pre-fame days, having demoed it in their early sessions in Liverpool. But they kept it in the can, perhaps because its reflective mood didn’t fit in with the cocky tone of their other songs at the time. But it adds beleaguered heft to Be Here Now’s jaundiced-rock star mood, and today it resonates as one of their great ballad peaks. —J.D.

Noel Gallagher’s four-pints-in platitudes took a noticeably zen turn after he spent a month in Thailand in 1997. “We don’t claim to be perfect but we’re free,” he sings. “Fading like the stars we wish to be.” But after the song’s Pink Floydian minor-key lurch, the chorus boomerangs back to the only nirvana Oasis knows: a larger-than-life melody about keeping a chin up when the world’s gone to bloody Hell. According to Noel, Liam had a hard time with the vocal part, so he gave it a go. “You could see [Liam] sat at the desk going, ‘Fucking bastard. He’s got it.’” Years later, the ever-humble Liam tweeted: “I can and will sing any song [Noel] wrote better [sic] than him even if I was kicked in the bollox by a wood pigeon.” —S.G.

Noel would later dismiss the second single from Morning Glory as “shit,” but we respectfully disagree. The mid-tempo thumper conjures up visions of Noel mainlining Revolver and no one sings a hard “B” or “D” like Liam — “Don’t ever BEEEE DEnied.” The music press breathlessly hyped and pitted “Roll With It” against Blur’s “Country House” as both songs came out the same week, resulting in peak “Battle of Britpop” headlines. (Blur won that round.). —J.N.

Such was the cockiness of the Gallaghers coming off the mega-success of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? that they chose a nearly eight-minute song with backward vocals, loads of feedback, and the sound of someone spitting as the first radio single from 1996’s Be Here Now. And no one stopped them. In hindsight, “D’You Know What I Mean?” was just the right song to announce such a bloated, noisy album, but unlike the whole of Be Here Now, this one holds up. While it may lack the melody of a “Wonderwall,” the anthem makes up for it with menace and swagger — the perfect combination for Oasis’s mercurial frontman. —J.H.

Sure they may have nicked the melody from Neil Innes’ 1973 British pop obscurity “How Sweet to Be an Idiot,” but….whatever. The band’s first non-album single is anchored by the London Session Orchestra, whose strings class up the joint and balance Liam’s defiant proclamations to be “freeeeeee to be whatever I want.” Three years later, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra would famously and terribly cover the group’s songs for an album, but ignore that and just listen to this on repeat. —J.N.

For all his bluster and bravado, Noel’s a big softie at heart (“Talk Tonight” has reduced the most alpha of bros to rubble). The penultimate song off Definitely, Maybe recounts Gallagher’s tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend at the time. “I dream of you — we talk of growing old,” Liam sings before adding the devastating rejoinder, “But you said please don’t!” All songs, of course, are open to interpretation. Exhibit A: The Oasis fan who wrote on Reddit, “I’ve got a tramp stamp that says, ‘Slide in, baby / Together we’ll fly.’” Love is love. —J.N.

Oasis’ first U.K. Number One single began as a Noel demo, which was slower, harder, and, in his words, “sleazier” than the version that ended up on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. The version released to the world added a Britpop gloss that made it a perfect marriage of Stones swagger and Beatle-esque brightness. The lyrics are as hermetically goofy as any Oasis tune, but the soaring chorus, “some might say we will find a brighter day,” touched a nerve in England after 16 long years of Conservative rule. “Oasis were on Top of the Pops, I think ‘Some Might Say’ had just got Number One,” recalled veteran British journalist and historian John Savage in Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop, “And I remember watching them, and I just cried. I thought, ‘Something is really changing here.’” —J.D.

To most of the world in the summer of 1994, the Gallagher brothers were nobody. By the time the first track on Definitely, Maybe ended, they were rock stars. The opener on Oasis’ debut set all the ground rules for this band: The riffs would be big, the lyrics would be simple enough to remember at the end of the night, and somehow it would all feel like the truth. When Liam sang about living his life for the stars that shine, he struck a chord that has kept on echoing through 30 years of karaoke sessions and road-trip playlists. The key is that word “tonight” — when you turn this one up loud enough, you’re a star too. —S.V.L.

“I think it’s the best song I’ve ever written,” Noel Gallagher told NME of this beloved B-side to “Wonderwall.” Sung by Noel and featuring an orchestra, it’s the elder Gallagher’s opus, a swelling ballad about how there’s really no plan to existence after all. “This sums up your journey through life,” he said in the liner notes to the compilation The Masterplan. “All we know is that we don’t know.” Many U.S. fans got their first taste of the song when Noel performed it during a1996 episode of MTV Unplugged — which Liam infamously skipped. —J.H.

Before Chappell Roan, the only supernova song involving alcoholic beverages was “Champagne Supernova,” the Britpop anthem that closes (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. Noel Gallagher has described it as “probably as psychedelic as I’ll ever get,” which only confirms to us that he turned on Sgt. Pepper, heard “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and decided to craft his own masterpiece about the sky. The power ballad features the Jam’s Paul Weller delivering one tearjerker of a solo, alongside trippy lines like, “Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball/Where were you while we were getting high?” If you’ve ever pondered what it’s about, so has Noel. “Some of the lyrics were written when I was out of it,” he told NME in 1995. “It means different things when I’m in different moods.” —A.M.

Maybe it’s Liam’s mimic of the Johnny Rotten sneer — “suhn-shiiine” — but “Cigarettes and Alcohol” feels in line with some of punk’s most revelatory, if cynical, offerings (on top the riff-lifting from Chuck Berry via T. Rex). But this isn’t exactly the Sex Pistols’ “No Future.” The future is laid out clearly here — it’s just filled with impossible dreams and shitty jobs (if you can get one) so “might as well do the white line.” That makes “Cigarettes & Alcohol” a sort of celebration of cheap, mortality-quickening thrills, a no future of its own, but the song lives fully in the glorious self-destruction of the present. Is this a “healthy” way to live? A “good” way to live?” Probably not. But does it rock? Well, yeah. —J.B.

The greatest of the Oasis B-sides? We sure think so. Recorded during the (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? sessions, “Acquiesce” was ultimately left off the 1995 album, appearing instead as the B-side to the U.K. single “Some Might Say.” While it’d later be released on the 1998 compilation The Masterplan, the song’s legacy casts a much longer shadow. To many fans, it’s the ultimate Liam/Noel collab, with Our Kid sneering the verses and his older brother handling the chorus’s message of unity: “Because we need each other/We believe in one another.” They may have often been at the other’s throat, but on “Acquiesce” the brothers are in perfect harmony. —J.H.

“What the fuck is this tune?” This was Liam Gallagher’s response to hearing his brother Noel’s new song in May 1995, a heart-wrenching ballad he supposedly wrote for his girlfriend at the time. Three decades later, “Wonderwall” is a rock standard with over two billion streams on Spotify, covered by everyone from Ed Sheeran to Paul Anka. Liam has come around to it, while Noel still has mixed feelings. “You play the opening first three seconds and everybody goes, ‘Right, this is what we’ve fucking come for,’” he told us in 2019. “All the great artists have one of those songs. I’m lucky to have five. And it’s funny, in no fucking way is it my favorite song.” —A.M.

In an interview with Mojo, Noel Gallagher summed up the attitude Oasis had as they embarked on their career in 1994. “We’re going to take U2 on. That’s where my band are heading. I don’t give a fuck about Felt or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. I’m aiming for bigger shit than that.” Never has not giving a fuck about Ned’s Atomic Dustbin sounded so world-beatingly awesome as on “Supersonic,” with its John Lennon-meets-Johnny Rotten sneer, avalanche of over-dubbed guitars, and the glorious declamation, “I need to be myself/I can’t be no one else.” Noel Gallagher claims he wrote it in a half hour, spooling out disjointed lines like “I’m feeling supersonic/Give me gin and tonic” and “”I know a girl called Elsa/She’s into Alka-Seltzer” into something that felt touched by the rock gods, who’d soon be welcoming Oasis into their pantheon. —J.D.

If you’ve never felt this way about a friend, bandmate, lover, or absolute rando cheers-ing your fourth pint of the night, can you really say you’ve lived? “Maybe you’re the same as me/We see things they’ll never see/You and I are gonna live forever” — Noel unlocked the absurd, romantic intensity of so many late-adolescent nights when he wrote those lines. Millions of impressionable youths heard these guys lay claim to a secret wisdom about the world and shouted, “Yes!” Some of them even started bands to express all those same things they saw. None of them wrote a song half as eternal as “Live Forever.” —S.V.L.

“Wonderwall” has gotten the memes, the karaoke and campfire immortality, but in the Oasis pantheon, one song still stands above them all. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is the Oasis ideal: A belter of a ballad, best sung with arms flung around others’ shoulders, built from unabashed Beatles worship, but still its own beautiful thing, and sly enough to know, “Please don’t put your life in the hands/Of a rock ‘n’ roll band/Who’ll throw it all away.” And then there’s the other obvious resonance. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is a song that prizes acceptance and forgiveness, moving forward in life with neither regret, nor grievance. It offers up a way of living that Noel and Liam Gallagher should’ve probably embraced years ago, and maybe they finally have. —J.B.