Image via Warner Records Inc. By Jeremy Urquhart Published Jul 9, 2026, 12:08 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us On Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread 1 Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Was the 1970s the best decade for music ? Maybe. It’s not actually something that has to be answered here, necessarily, but it is relevant in the sense that it makes picking any selection of great songs from the decade in question potentially harder than it might be for other decades . There was a lot of rock, pop, soul, and yes, even some disco music, plus some other genres, and many of them arguably peaked in the 1970s.
The best thing to do would be not to undertake something like this in the first place. But there are bills to pay, and food to buy. The undertaking is happening. So, the second-best thing to do is pick songs that are largely well-regarded, but perhaps also personally favored by the person picking them. Being objective here is harder than usual, as there is an unfathomable number of songs that could be picked here. But these ones are all great. They're among the best songs of the 1970s , and to keep things varied, there’s a limit of one song per artist.
“Bridge over Troubled Water” was the title track for what ended up being the final studio album by Simon & Garfunkel . It’s the duo’s only one of the 1970s, though in the case of “Bridge over Troubled Water,” the song, it was recorded in 1969, and then released within the first few weeks of the new decade. It’s a grand ballad, and has an incredible crescendo that builds over almost five minutes.
It’s Simon & Garfunkel’s peak, which is saying a lot, considering how many memorable songs the duo recorded throughout their relatively short partnership. “Bridge over Troubled Water” is simple with what it goes for lyrically, but it’s all in the execution that makes it genuinely work . And, credit to Art Garfunkel , whose post-Simon & Garfunkel work does sometimes get overshadowed by Paul Simon ’s, but Garfunkel’s…