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How Rod Stewart Made ‘Sailing’: The Only Song He Ever Recorded Sober
Rod Stewart has a pre-show ritual older than most of his audience: a drink to settle the nerves before he sings. He has followed it in studios and on stages for over fifty years, with exactly one exception. The exception became the biggest-selling single of his career in Britain — a hymn of homesickness recorded…
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How Roberta Flack Made ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’: The Offhand Remark That Became Her Third Number One
Some hit songs are laboured over for months. Feel Like Makin’ Love began as a sentence spoken on a doorstep. In the early 1970s the singer-songwriter Eugene McDaniels had lent his in-laws’ cabin at Lake Arrowhead, California, to himself, his family and his assistant, Morgan Ames, for a short break. After a single day, Ames…
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How REO Speedwagon Made ‘Time for Me to Fly’: The Song That Took Ten Years to Leave the Ground
Every long-running band has one song that refuses to die — and usually it is not the one the charts anointed. For REO Speedwagon, the song that outlasted all their number ones began life around 1970, in Boulder, Colorado, where a college freshman named Kevin Cronin was trying to walk away from his high-school sweetheart…
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How Queen Made ‘Somebody to Love’: The Gospel Prayer Freddie Mercury Built From Three Voices
It begins with a single voice asking a question in the dark. “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Freddie Mercury sings it almost alone, his piano underneath him, and within seconds the answer comes back like a congregation rising to its feet — a huge, swaying gospel choir, dozens of voices strong, except that…
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How Prince Made ‘Little Red Corvette’: The Dream He Had in a Pink Mercury
The most famous car in Prince’s catalogue was never a Corvette, and it was not red. It was a pink-and-white 1964 Mercury Montclair Marauder, a vast vintage cruiser belonging to Lisa Coleman, the keyboard player in his band. In the spring of 1982, Prince was working the punishing hours that were already his trademark, recording…
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How Ray Charles Made ‘I Got a Woman’: The Gospel Song He Stole From the Radio and Turned Into Soul
In the summer of 1954, Ray Charles was a twenty-three-year-old pianist grinding through one-night stands in the segregated South, still best known — where he was known at all — for smooth records imitating Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Atlantic Records had signed him in 1952, but nothing had quite caught. Then, on the…
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How Pink Floyd Made ‘Arnold Layne’: The Washing-Line Thief Who Launched a Band
Most bands announce themselves with a love song or a statement of intent. Pink Floyd announced themselves with a miniature character study about a man who stole women’s underwear from washing lines in Cambridge. “Arnold Layne,” released on 10 March 1967, was the group’s first single, and remains one of the most improbable debuts in…
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How Paul McCartney Made ‘My Love’: The Solo Henry McCullough Talked His Way Into
Every great love song has a moment where the feeling escapes the plan, and on My Love you can hear the exact second it happens — a guitar solo that was never supposed to exist. Paul McCartney had written the solo himself, as he usually did. Moments before the take, his guitarist Henry McCullough leaned…
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How Phil Collins Made ‘Easy Lover’: The Twenty-Minute Jam That Became a Transatlantic Smash
It is the great accidental hit of Phil Collins’s 1980s. “Easy Lover” was never meant to be a Phil Collins record at all. Collins had been hired for one job: to produce Chinese Wall, the 1984 solo album by Philip Bailey, the falsetto voice of Earth, Wind & Fire. He was not the star, not…
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How Petula Clark Made ‘This Is My Song’: The Chaplin Song She Tried to Stop
The strangest number one of 1967 was written by a silent-film comedian who had been famous before its singer was born, intended for a singer who had been dead for sixteen years, and recorded by a star who disliked its lyrics so much that she tried to block its release. This Is My Song —…