Ever wonder why rock icon Randy Bachman stutters all the way through You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet? Or what No Sugar Tonight really means?

Building on four decades as a songwriter and baby boom music icon, Bachman has launched a new compilation CD entitled Every Song Tells a Story.

The CD package, which also includes a special DVD, chronicles the secrets behind his music and how each song came to be written.

The music portion brings together for the first time ever the hits of The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.

It contains 13 top 10 hits performed by Bachman and his band during a live "unplugged" concert set, recorded in Vancouver in April 2002. It's Bachman first solo release since 1996.

But while the arrangements are hot, the stories behind the songs are cooler. Take his signature hit Taking Care of Business, for example.

Unbeknownst to the music world, Bachman says he first got the idea for the song after hearing the Beatles hit Paperback Rider in the mid '60s.

"I wanted to write a song like that," Bachman says in an interview with CTV's Canada AM. He also wanted to write a song like Chuck Berry's Johnny Be Good, and decided to combine the two styles into a creation of his own.

With a musical rhythm in mind, Bachman turned his attention to hammering out the lyrics.

"I had been to New York and seen commuters taking the 8:15 into the city," he says in revealing the true history of the now infamous phrase.

The end result was an unpublished fluffy tune called White Collar Worker which had the same lyrics as the current song, but with an airy tone extremely similar to the Beatles rift he had set out to imitate. His band mates hated it.

"Everybody in The Guess Who said 'forget about it, we can't do this.' But I kept bringing the song up because I really liked it."

Years later, while playing at a club in Vancouver, Bachman heard the DJ come over the microphone and utter the words "we're taking care of business."

"And I thought great song title," Bachman said.

On a whim, and without thinking about it for more than a few minutes, Bachman decided to dump White Collar Worker's light-hearted tone and instead instructed the band to play three guitar chords over and over again.

The song was born right there on stage as the crowd cheered and clapped along.

"What happened the night on stage was miraculous," Bachman recalls. "The band started to sing it with me, I answered them and when we stopped playing, the crowd kept clapping and singing it."

The stories behind Bachman's other hit songs contain similar off-beat anecdotes and humorous plot lines.

Consider the time he was almost mugged by three thugs in New York, only to be saved by a furious woman out looking for her boyfriend -- one of the would-be muggers.

That same night, Bachman used the incident to pen the song No Sugar Tonight to reflect the chilly evening the mugger had in store when he returned home with a very angry girlfriend.

Bachman is scheduled to tour Canada in March and April, and can be seen on CTV's Vicki Gabereau show Nov. 13.