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How Madonna Made ‘Vogue’: The $5,000 B-Side That Was Too Good to Waste
It was supposed to be a throwaway. In late 1989, Madonna’s label wanted a cheap new track to prop up a forthcoming single, and the man hired to make it was given a budget of $5,000 — petty cash by superstar standards. Three months later that filler track had a David Fincher video, a No.…
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How Luther Vandross Made ‘A House Is Not a Home’: The Seven-Minute Sermon He Sang to His Idol
The lights were low, the occasion was a tribute, and in the front rows sat Dionne Warwick — the woman whose records had taught a teenage Luther Vandross what singing could be. Vandross walked to the microphone at the 1988 NAACP Image Awards and began, very slowly, to sing Warwick’s own song back to her:…
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How Lynyrd Skynyrd Made ‘Simple Man’: Two Funerals, One Hour, and a Producer Banished to His Car
Most rock anthems are written by men trying to sound immortal. Simple Man was written by two young men who had just buried the women who raised them. In 1973, within a short span, Ronnie Van Zant lost his grandmother and Gary Rossington lost his mother. The singer and the guitarist of a not-yet-famous Jacksonville…
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How Louis Armstrong Made ‘West End Blues’: Twelve Seconds of Trumpet That Changed Jazz Forever
Before the band plays a note, before the tune is even stated, Louis Armstrong stands alone. For roughly twelve seconds he pours out a trumpet cadenza — unaccompanied, rhythmically free, climbing and tumbling with an operatic boldness that jazz records were simply not supposed to contain — and by the time the rest of the…
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How Lionel Richie Made ‘Endless Love’: The 3 A.M. Duet That Outshone the Film and Ruled Nine Weeks at Number One
The film is a footnote now. The song is a monument. In 1981, Lionel Richie — still, officially, a member of the Commodores — was asked to supply music for a glossy teenage romance that the critics would savage, and he answered with a ballad he wrote, produced and sang with Diana Ross. Endless Love…
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How Linda Ronstadt Made ‘Blue Bayou’: The Orbison Song Two Friends Talked Her Into, and the Hit That Became Her Signature
Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou had been a beautiful near-miss: a song about a homesick working man saving his money to return to the place where the folks are fine and the world is mine, recorded in the early 1960s and largely overlooked in its writer’s own country. Fourteen years later it fell into the hands…
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How Kiss Made ‘Beth’: The Drummer’s Joke Song That Buried an Anthem and Topped the Charts
Kiss built their empire on volume, fire and four-inch heels, and their biggest American hit contains none of it. Beth is two minutes and forty-nine seconds of piano, strings and a drummer singing softly about a woman waiting at home. It was written as a joke in somebody else’s band, smuggled onto a Kiss album…
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How Leo Sayer Made ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’: The Studio Jam That Became a Grammy-Winning Number One
Some number one records are engineered for months. This one was practically an accident — a loose jam in a Los Angeles studio, caught before it could evaporate, by a five-foot-five English singer with a clown’s haircut and a falsetto that could float over any groove a band cared to play. You Make Me Feel…
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How Kim Carnes Made ‘I’ll Be Here Where the Heart Is’: The Flashdance Ballad That Was Never a Single
Ask anyone to hum the Flashdance soundtrack and you will get two No. 1 singles: Irene Cara riding the audition of her life, Michael Sembello running with the Maniac. But the film’s beating heart is neither of them. It is a slow, smoky ballad that plays while the heroine sits alone with her grief and…
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How Led Zeppelin Made ‘Immigrant Song’: Two Days in Iceland, a Viking Cry, and the Single the Band Never Wanted
It is the shortest explosion in the Led Zeppelin catalogue: two minutes and twenty-six seconds, no guitar solo, no quiet passage, nothing wasted. Immigrant Song opens with Robert Plant’s wailing battle cry — a sound somewhere between a war horn and a siren — and then rides a staccato riff that Jimmy Page, John Paul…