The Doors' 30 most essential songs, ranked

The grimiest, grittiest number on the Doors’ hardest album, “Been Down So Long” consciously plays with a few shopworn blues tropes—sentiments that the band doesn’t reinvent so much as enliven with their heavy swing. John Densmore hits the backbeat with vengeance, and while the rest of the band matches his attack, it’s Jim Morrison who commands attention with his vulgar, guttural growl.

“Peace Frog” boasts an unusually cluttered groove, yet its busyness is a feature, not a bug. Robby Krieger wrote the music that John Densmore gave a high-octane funk edge. That essential rhythm, when combined with Ray Manzarek’s garish organ, creates almost no space for Jim Morrison to vamp, yet he forces his words into the meager gaps, amping up the energy to a feverish level.

Picking up the thread left dangling by “Peace Frog,” “The Changeling” finds the Doors bending funk to serve their own needs. Working a minimalist groove fueled by Ray Manzarek’s organ, the band slowly ratchets up their intensity, taking their cues from a Jim Morrison intent on mining maximum drama from his lyric. By the end, the Doors transform the track’s inherent funk into a furious garage banger.

When the Doors covered “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar),” a tune written in the late 1920s by Bertolt Brecht and put to music by Kurt Weill, these German composers weren’t necessarily unheard in American pop music. Bobby Darin had a huge hit with “Mack The Knife,” a song they wrote for The Threepenny Opera, back in 1959. Where Darin sang “Mack The Knife,” the Doors retained a carnivalesque spirit in their version of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),” marrying psychedelic flair to a galumphing polka beat. There’s a sense of drunken decadence hanging over the Doors’ cover of “Alabama Song,” the cabaret debauchery undercut by a literary bent, a fusion that established a distinct tradition within art-rock: David Bowie himself would cut “Alabama Song,” using the Doors’ version as his blueprint.

Jim Morrison wrote the original version of “Soul Kitchen” as an ode to Olivia’s, his favorite soul food joint in Venice Beach. What began as an earthy reality quickly turned spiritual when transformed into a song, a process aided by Morrison’s heated imagery and, especially, the Doors’ limber funk. With Ray Manzarek vamping on organ, Robby Krieger colors the rhythms with terse blues riffs and elongated solos, giving “Soul Kitchen” its pulse.

The endearing thing about “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat),” Jim Morrison’s salute to the blues that drifted from Africa to Virginia and through the Lone Star state, is that it barely has a hint of blues to it. Sure, the Doors play with a bit of an R&B swing and Morrison’s voice is phased to sound like it’s coming out of a transistor radio, but the jaunty swing feels more cabaret than roadhouse. Far from causing embarrassment, this bit of campy swagger serves as a silly respite from the smeary urban jungles that populate L.A. Woman.

At the urging of producer Paul A. Rothchild, the Doors decided to widen their canvas on The Soft Parade—a move fueled as much by their lack of new material as their creative restlessness. This decision gave Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger plenty of room to explore, especially since Jim Morrison spent much of the sessions as a half-presence. Morrison did go all-in on the title track, an absurdly overblown epic stitched together from his poetry notebooks and given a purple psychedelic arrangement to match. In its highs and lows, it captures all the pomp and glory of this notoriously misguided album.

An oddity in many respects, “Land Ho!” is a teeming mess of adventure fantasy from Jim Morrison and Robby Krieger. Morrison hints at cinematic scope, backed by Krieger’s music, telling tales of sailors, whalers, and pirates roaming the seas. The Doors convey that sense of derring-do with a jaunty bounce that almost seems giddy.

A cool breeze blowing through the fetid swamps of L.A. Woman, “Hyacinth House” can’t quite be called a moment of contemplation. Jim Morrison, for once, doesn’t attempt to dig too deeply on this ballad, choosing to offer fragments and glimpses of loneliness and longing, sentiments that are conveyed by his unusually relaxed vocals as well as the sweet clusters of chords emanating from Ray Manzarek’s Hammond organ.

The first single pulled from Waiting For The Sun, “The Unknown Soldier” builds upon the dread the Doors essayed on “The End” and “When The Music’s Over,” transporting that gloom onto a song that feels like an anti-war missive. The Doors cram a considerable amount of drama within the space of three minutes, transforming a creepy organ fanfare into a churning protest punctuated by Jim Morrison’s striking imagery and guttural yawps.

“Summer’s Almost Gone” ruminates upon the passing of the seasons, yet the way it’s framed it’s easy to interpret it as a meditation on larger lifecycles. The Doors don’t dwell upon what they’re soon to lose, they’re reveling in the moments that are quickly transforming into memories, a process that seems simultaneously joyous and melancholy.

A simple rocker in the vein of “Love Me Two Times” and “Hello, I Love You,” “Love Her Madly” distinguishes itself from its predecessor thanks to the heft of its swing. Ray Manzarek’s tack piano may be as nimble as John Densmore’s shuffle, yet the song gets consumed by swirling waves of guitar and, especially, Jim Morrison crooning with the conviction of a saloon singer playing to the evening’s last remaining stragglers.

Arriving after the spooky “The Crystal Ship” on The Doors, “Twentieth Century Fox” functions as a raunchy riposte to its trippy predecessor. A swaggering, sexy boast filled with knowing asides—the song’s title itself is a pun on the famous movie studio—it’s among the lightest and silliest numbers the Doors cut. That’s its appeal, of course: it’s their sunbaked interpretation of such classic blues numbers as Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man,” a blues standard they covered elsewhere on The Doors.

Playing the same role on Strange Days as “The End” does on The Doors, “When The Music’s Over” is a rambling epic that sprawls out over the course of 11 minutes. Where “The End” displays a mastery of minimalism, “When The Music’s Over” is a mini-suite of interlocking parts. Much of the song mines similar territory to its companion, though: there are long stretches where the band floats upon the waves of a drone, riding tides that ebb and flow.

The Doors first test-drove “Strange Days” long before they released their debut album in early 1967, yet when it served as the title track of its swiftly released successor, the song seemed like something of an evolution from their first record. Some of that could be the fact that the song features a Moog synthesizer, but it’s not one instrument that gives “Strange Days” its distinctive cadence. The Doors as a whole sound bolder and more unified on “Strange Days,” cramming its three minutes with spacey textures and harder rhythms—an undeniable sonic progression from their debut.

“Moonlight Drive” contains the lyrics that convinced Ray Manzarek to form a band with Jim Morrison: once he heard “Let’s swim to the moon/Let’s climb through the tide/Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide,” he knew he had to join forces with the singer. The Doors attempted it for their debut then revived it on Strange Days, achieving a woozy sway that captures the neon charms of late night Los Angeles. Part of the charm derives from Robby Krieger playing slide guitar and avoiding blues cliches, a decision that keeps the song appealingly off kilter.

“The Crystal Ship” opens with Jim Morrison crooning “Before you slip into unconsciousness/I’d like to have another kiss,” a line that seems like a final farewell. The note of dread wasn’t necessarily intentional. Morrison conceived the song as a love letter to a former girlfriend, his goodbyes turning slightly sinister when paired with the open-ended psychedelia of the Doors. With suspended chords, hushed rhythms, and an elongated melody, the Doors create a dream world with a narcotic undertow, a sound that’s soothing and disquieting in equal measure.

At its heart, “Love Me Two Times” is a blues song, a heavy stomp driven by a muscular Robby Krieger riff and a gutsy performance from Jim Morrison. What happens in the margin is what makes “Love Me Two Times” distinctly the Doors. Ray Manzarek chooses to decorate the hard-hitting rhythms from John Densmore with a clanging harpsichord, playing the baroque keyboard as if it belonged in a juke joint. By the time Manzarek gets to his solo, Krieger has strayed from his riff, playing twisty fills and chords that keep this hard rocker lithe and lively.

The pop charts was not foreign territory for the Doors, who wound up reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with their second single. Despite their long history of hits, “Touch Me” felt different from their previous singles, as if it was designed to be plastered upon AM airwaves. It’s the overstuffed production as much as the song itself. Crowded by hopping horns and swathes of strings, Jim Morrison decides to croon the song like a lounge singer gone to seed, a choice that gives “Touch Me” a cheap and tawdry appeal.

The end result of an in-studio jam, “Five To One” retained a primal energy in its finished form. That primitivism is there in its inception, in the walloping martial beat laid down by John Densmore, whose rhythm sets the pace for the metallic snarl of Robby Krieger and fiery fanfares of Ray Manzaerk. Still, it’s Jim Morrison who eats up all the attention, spitting out threats between flights of poetic fancy. Maybe the lyrics don’t hold together as a narrative but Morrison feels feverish and inspired as he unleashes asides that became rallying calls, such as “no one here gets out alive,” which would become the title of Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins’ 1980 biography of the singer.

The Doors broadened their horizons on Waiting For The Sun while also trimming away some of the indulgences that brought the group toward unexpected heights. These two qualities can be heard on “Love Street,” the lightest and sweetest tune the band cut to date, one of their one songs that could qualify as pure pop. As the title suggests, “Love Street” is a love song at heart, a song Jim Morrison penned during the early days of his romance with Pamela Courson. With its nimble gait and delicate flourishes from Ray Manzarek, it feels spry and sprightly, a song that hints at possibilities instead of dwelling in the darkness.

The second and final Doors single to reach number one, “Hello, I Love You” plays a bit like a sequel to “Love Me Two Times”—a bare-bones rocker propelled in equal measure by John Densmore and Ray Manzarek pounding away on their respective instruments. The song would later get embroiled in accusations that it repurposed the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night”—it is true that it’s one of the group’s earlier tunes, written a year after the Kinks classic hit the charts—but the hard-headed thrust thoroughly belongs to the Doors, as does the bare-chested machismo of Jim Morrison’s bellow.

Two years after releasing an album called Waiting For The Sun, the Doors finally got around to finishing its title track. The song benefitted from the delay. While the Doors didn’t renounce psychedelia on Morrison Hotel, they did wind up using it as coloring and texture, relying instead on walloping blues. That shift in emphasis gives “Waiting For The Sun” ballast, letting it explore space without drifting out into the ether.

Closing out L.A. Woman and, in turn, Jim Morrison’s time with the Doors, “Riders On The Storm” shimmers like rain on the horizon—a mellow twilight jam fueled by Ray Manzarek, who alternates between atmospheric washes of electric piano and soul-jazz vamping. Unlike many of the other elongated Doors tracks, “Riders On The Storm” doesn’t venture into uncharted territory. It is neither a suite nor a restless exploration, it is a sustained groove that seems to spill out endlessly over miles and miles of open road.

Rallying quickly after the indulgent mess of The Soft Parade, the Doors went back to basics on Morrison Hotel. Kicking off the record was “Roadhouse Blues,” the hardest and purest blues the band ever recorded. Some of the power of the track lies in how the Doors were augmented in the studio by two prime guest stars: famed six-string slinger Lonnie Mack plays bass, while John Sebastian provides greasy harmonica.

There’s a distinct sense of alienation coursing through “People Are Strange.” Jim Morrison dwells on being a stranger who feels alone, yet the way the Doors play the song it hardly seems depressive. With its careening rhythms and jaunty piano, “People Are Strange” is a celebration of misfits who dwell on the fringes of society, and a rallying call for those who lurk on uneven streets in the rain.

“Light My Fire” became a runaway hit in the spring of 1967, its ornate psychedelia becoming an AM pop smash just prior to the onset of the Summer of Love. On The Doors, “Light My Fire” stretched out for seven minutes, its long instrumental sections finding keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robbie Krieger spinning out revolving solos as the band vamps over a vaguely Latin rhythm. All that was cut for the single, which distilled the song to its carnal essence: namely, Jim Morrison imploring a potential lover to set the night on fire. That yearning became the touchstone for subsequent covers, including Jose Feliciano’s sultry rendition that arrived a year later, but the key to the Doors’ version is how it’s not plaintive but urgent, from its shotgun start to its cathartic release, an escalation that’s more potent in the single edit than in the album version.

In some ways, the culmination of the Doors’ entire journey with Jim Morrison, “L.A. Woman” is as much an epic as either “The End” or “When The Music’s Over,” but there’s a notable difference. Here, the subject isn’t interior exploration, it’s a full immersion into their hometown of Los Angeles. Over a hardened blues boogie—a rhythm that never softens, even when it’s decorated with Ray Manzarek’s jazzy flourishes—Jim Morrison paints a portrait of Los Angeles from its suburbs and Hollywood bungalows to the hills on fire. It so thoroughly captures the glamor and decadence of L.A. at its imagined peak that it still seems like the city’s unofficial anthem 50 years after its original release.

“The End,” the Doors’ magnum opus, can be seen as ground zero for much of the transgressive rock that arrived in the following decades. Over the course of nearly 12 minutes, much of which is driven by the hypnotic pulse of Robby Krieger’s winding guitar, Jim Morrison rides the snake from a simple farewell to a cataclysmic Oedipus fantasy. Once he crosses the rubicon, Morrison abandons language and the Doors collapse in a frenzy, a move that seems as menacing as the slow, steady creep of the song’s first eight minutes. It’s that controlled tension—cinematic in its scope and execution—that makes “The End” a marvel long after its formal innovations have been absorbed by subsequent generations.

The first single released by the Doors, and the openinging song on their debut LP, “Break on Through (To the Other Side)“ can’t help but be seen as something of a manifesto for a band who sought to travel to unknown places. Perhaps the song isn’t as ominous or as psychedelic as “The End,” but the Doors conjure a spectral urgency with their bouncing bossa nova blues, the tense rhythm providing an ideal bed for Jim Morrison’s quest for transcendence. The Doors often returned to the idea that physical pleasure leads to spiritual awakening but here they captured it in a single that lasts under two and a half minutes.