“Photograph” by Nickelback

"Photograph" was the first single from Nickelback's fifth album, All the Right Reasons, in 2005, and it's Chad Kroeger in full scrapbook mode. He wrote the lyric, the band wrote the music, and the subject is his own small-town youth: the friends he drifted away from, the school, the dumb stunts, first love, and the plain fact that nobody gets to go back.

It's a big, sentimental blend of post-grunge crunch, soft rock and country twang, and Kroeger has owned up to the details. The snapshot he waves around in the video, of him and his friend Joey Moi with a champagne chiller perched on Moi's head, is the same one the song mentions, and he says he actually broke into his high school to rob the office safe eleven times but trimmed the number in the lyric because it sang better. It climbed to number two in the US.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.