-
How Styx Made ‘Fooling Yourself’: The Angry Young Man Was Dennis DeYoung
It is the most encouraging song Styx ever recorded — a five-and-a-half-minute pep talk about getting up, getting back on your feet, and refusing to waste a bright future. But Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man) was not written as a pep talk for the audience. It began as one band member quietly studying another.…
-
How Talking Heads Made ‘Psycho Killer’: An Alice Cooper Ballad From the Art School Years
The first song Talking Heads ever wrote together was a murder ballad they imagined as a joke about villainy — and it outlived every cooler, cleverer thing they did afterwards. Psycho Killer was written in a Rhode Island art school in 1974, three years before anyone outside a few New York clubs had heard of…
-
How Stevie Wonder Made ‘My Cherie Amour’: The Love Song He Wrote in an Hour at Sixteen — and Motown Shelved
It is one of the most beloved love songs ever recorded, and it began as homework of the heart. In 1966, a sixteen-year-old boarding student at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing sat down and wrote a song in about an hour for a girl he liked. By the time the record company…
-
How Supertramp Made ‘Dreamer’: The Teenage Demo Banged Out on Boxes and Lampshades
One of the most polished recordings of the 1970s began as a teenager banging on household objects in his mother’s front room. Roger Hodgson was nineteen years old when he sat down at a Wurlitzer electric piano — the first one he had ever played — and felt a song simply fly out of him.…
-
How Steely Dan Made ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’: The Lost Phone Number and the Borrowed Jazz Riff
It begins with an instrument most listeners could not name — a strange, woody solo that floats free of the beat — and then settles into a bassline that every jazz fan in America recognised on first hearing. Rikki Don’t Lose That Number opened Steely Dan’s third album, Pretzel Logic, in February 1974, and by…
-
How Smokey Robinson Made ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’: The Hotel-Room Confession That Became a B-Side Sensation
In 1962, Smokey Robinson — all of twenty-two years old — went to New York on business for Motown, the young Detroit label where he was simultaneously star singer, chief songwriter and vice president, and came home with one of the most honest love songs ever written. Sam Cooke’s Bring It On Home to Me…
-
How Sade Made ‘Paradise’: The Quiet Groove That Became Their First American R&B Number One
By 1987, the music industry had a problem with Sade: the band would not hurry. Two albums — Diamond Life and Promise — had sold in the tens of millions and made Sade Adu the most recognisable voice in Britain, yet the follow-up was taking years, and the four musicians responsible for it had largely…
-
How Shirley Bassey Made ‘Big Spender’: The Chorus-Line Taunt She Stole for Herself
The record lasts one minute and forty-eight seconds. That is all Shirley Bassey needed. In September 1967, the Welsh singer took a song that had been written for a whole line of Broadway chorus girls — a teasing, hip-swaying come-on delivered by a row of jaded dance-hall hostesses — and compressed it into a single…
-
How Sam Cooke Made ‘Bring It On Home to Me’: The Gospel Homecoming He Hid on a B-Side
On 26 April 1962, Sam Cooke walked into RCA’s Studio 1 in Hollywood and threw what everyone present remembered as a party. Friends crowded the floor, outtakes dissolved into laughter, and the engineer, Al Schmitt, would recall that everybody was simply having a ball. Out of that loose, happy session came two songs recorded the…
-
How Roy Orbison Made ‘In Dreams’: The Song That Arrived While He Slept
Roy Orbison said that he often heard music in his sleep, and that the trick was simply to wake up in time to write it down. One night in late 1962 the music that came to him was stranger than most: a lullaby about a candy-coloured clown called the sandman, a dream of a lost…