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How Patti LaBelle Made ‘If Only You Knew’: The Shelved Ballad That Gave Her a Solo Number One
By the early 1980s Patti LaBelle had been famous for twenty years, and almost none of that fame was hers alone. She had fronted the Bluebelles as a teenager, reinvented herself in the glitter and feathers of Labelle, and sung the lead on Lady Marmalade, one of the biggest records of 1975. But the solo…
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How Paul Simon Made ‘Mother and Child Reunion’: The Kingston Session That Took Reggae to American Radio
Paul Simon’s solo career began with an act of geography. Simon & Garfunkel were finished, the partnership dissolved after Bridge over Troubled Water amid exhaustion and quarrels over everything from film roles to final mixes, and the question hanging over Simon was the one that hangs over every songwriter leaving a famous act: whether the…
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How Patsy Cline Made ‘She’s Got You’: The Song Hank Cochran Delivered to Her Door
Most of Patsy Cline’s great records were fought over. Producer Owen Bradley would bring her a polished pop-leaning ballad, Cline would push back in favour of something harder and more country, and the records that made her immortal — I Fall to Pieces, Crazy — often came out of that friction. She’s Got You is…
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How Pat Benatar Made ‘Invincible’: The Movie Theme That Became Her Final Top Ten Hit
Most artists get a final top ten hit by accident. Pat Benatar got hers from a film almost nobody went to see. In the summer of 1985, Invincible — written by Holly Knight and Simon Climie, produced by Mike Chapman, and recorded as the theme to The Legend of Billie Jean — climbed to number…
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How Otis Redding Made ‘These Arms of Mine’: The Driver Who Sang in the Session’s Last Minutes
Otis Redding got his break because somebody else’s audition failed and the clock had not run out. In 1962 the young Georgian travelled to Memphis as the driver and spare singer in guitarist Johnny Jenkins’s band, on a trip arranged so that Atlantic Records could hear Jenkins, not him. Jenkins played, the men from Stax…
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How Olivia Newton-John Made ‘Magic’: The Number One Hit From the Flop Everybody Laughed At
In the summer of 1980, American cinemas hosted one of the great mismatches in pop history. The film was Xanadu, a roller-disco fantasy that critics savaged and audiences mostly avoided — a flop so complete that its failure helped inspire the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards. The single pulled from that film, however, spent…
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How Neil Young Made ‘Cinnamon Girl’: Three Songs, One Fever, and a Duet With Danny Whitten
The most efficient writing session of Neil Young’s life happened when he could barely stand up. In early 1969, laid up at his home in Topanga Canyon with the flu and a high fever, Young wrote three songs in a single feverish spell: Down by the River, Cowgirl in the Sand and the two minutes…
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How Marvin Gaye Made ‘What’s Going On’: The ‘Love Song’ Berry Gordy Refused to Release
On May 15, 1969, the Four Tops’ tour bus rolled into Berkeley, California, and Renaldo “Obie” Benson looked out at a street battle. Police were attacking anti-war protesters in People’s Park, in the violence that would be remembered as Bloody Thursday. Benson, a singer in one of Motown’s slickest harmony groups, found himself asking a…
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How Neil Diamond Made ‘Song Sung Blue’: The Mozart Melody He Turned Into His Last Solo Number One
Some of the biggest hits are stolen, politely, from the dead. In the spring of 1972 Neil Diamond released a single built on a melody Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had written almost two centuries earlier, and he did not dress the borrowing up as anything fancy. Song Sung Blue is three minutes and fifteen seconds long,…
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How Michael Jackson Made ‘Man in the Mirror’: The Demo Siedah Garrett Refused to Leave Until Monday
Of the eleven songs on Bad, Michael Jackson wrote nine. For an artist guarding the follow-up to Thriller, outside material was close to unthinkable — Quincy Jones warned songwriters that Jackson had not accepted an outside song in two years. Yet the album’s most enduring anthem came from two writers he had never worked with:…