"Baker Street" (Gerry Rafferty)

Scottish musician Gerry Rafferty was a founding member of the band Stealers Wheel, best known for its jangly 1972 hit "Stuck in the Middle with You" (a song that was used to great/creepy effect in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs some 20 years later).
However, Rafferty departed Stealers Wheel just before the single (which he co-wrote and sang the lead vocal on) made it big.  He spent the next five years trying to get out of his recording contract, which involved many hours spent traveling between his home near Glasgow and London to meet with his lawyers.  
When spending time in London, Rafferty often would crash at his friend's home on the famed Baker Street.  As he told the Scottish Daily Mail in 1995 (reprinted in the Washington Post in January 2011 after his death), the two would sit for hours, playing music and talking, which helped Rafferty get through his legal woes and feelings of isolation.
Once Rafferty finally was free and clear of his old contract and able to record again, he penned the song "Baker Street" (from the 1978 album City to City) as an autobiographical sketch of that bleak period in his life.
Musically, the song shifts between soft, introspective piano-driven sections on the verses and the decidedly more rocking eight-bar breaks, featuring that famous alto sax hook by session musician Raphael Ravenscroft and those swooping byooooooooo synth slides by session keyboardist Tommy Eyre.  Curiously, the song has no real chorus, only the instrumental breaks and bridges.  But I think having a wordless hook is a genius touch of composition that spotlights his world-weary lyrics.  Too, it makes the bittersweet triumph of the hook that much more anthemic and absorbing.