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How Kenny Rogers Made ‘Lady’: The Half-Finished Song Lionel Richie Finished in a Bathroom
For six weeks at the end of 1980, the biggest song in America was a love ballad sung by a bearded country star, written and produced by the frontman of a funk band, and finished — literally, in part — in a studio bathroom while the singer waited at the microphone. Lady was supposed to…
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How Kenny Loggins Made ‘I’m Alright’: The Golf Comedy Theme That Crowned the Soundtrack King
Every reign starts somewhere, and Kenny Loggins’s began on a golf course, in a film that did not yet have an ending — or a gopher. Before Footloose, before Danger Zone, before he was crowned the king of the eighties movie soundtrack, Loggins was simply a solo artist four years out of Loggins and Messina,…
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How Journey Made ‘Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)’: The Breakup Anthem Written in a Single Night on Tour
In 1982, Journey were the biggest rock band in America, and their private lives were coming apart at the seams. The album Escape had turned them into a stadium headline act, carrying Who’s Crying Now, Don’t Stop Believin’ and the wedding-standard ballad Open Arms into the top ten in quick succession — but success on…
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How Kansas Made ‘Play the Game Tonight’: The Stand-In Singer Who Delivered Their Comeback Hit
By the spring of 1982, Kansas had every reason to be finished. The band that had filled arenas with Leftoverture and Point of Know Return had lost its lead singer, its commercial momentum and, some nights, its sense of what it was singing about. The song that rescued them did not come from their principal…
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How Johnny Mathis Made ‘Too Much, Too Little, Too Late’: The Duet That Ended a 21-Year Wait for Number One
In the spring of 1978, America’s number-one song was a duet between a forty-two-year-old crooner whose last pop top ten had come in 1963, singing the hits of the Eisenhower era, and a twenty-seven-year-old former backing singer with a four-octave soprano. The pairing looked like a gimmick. It was, in fact, a rescue mission —…
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How Kool & the Gang Made ‘Jungle Boogie’: One Take, a Roadie’s Grunt, and a Riff Borrowed from Rock
By 1973, Kool & the Gang were in trouble. The Jersey City band — formed back in 1964 as the Jazziacs by brothers Robert “Kool” and Ronald Bell, with Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, Robert “Spike” Mickens, Claydes Charles Smith, George “Funky” Brown and Ricky West — had been schooled in jazz and signed to De-Lite…
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How Johnny Cash Made ‘A Boy Named Sue’: The Hit He Read off a Music Stand Inside San Quentin
On the evening of 24 February 1969, Johnny Cash walked onto a stage inside San Quentin State Prison carrying a song he had never performed, whose words he did not know, written by a children’s poet. Two days short of his thirty-seventh birthday, with a British television crew filming and two thousand inmates in front…
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How James Taylor Made ‘Carolina in My Mind’: The Homesick Song He Had to Record Twice
Most anthems are written at home. Carolina in My Mind was written about as far from home as a homesick twenty-year-old could get. In the summer of 1968 James Taylor was in London, the first non-British artist signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records, recording his debut album in the same studio complex where the Beatles…
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How John Denver Made ‘Annie’s Song’: The Ten-Minute Chairlift Ride That Filled Up His Senses
Some love songs are assembled over months, in studios, by committees. Annie’s Song was composed in about ten and a half minutes, at altitude, by a man sitting alone on a chairlift with his heart pounding from a ski run. In January 1973, John Denver — twenty-nine years old, famous, and quietly repairing a marriage…
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How Jim Croce Made ‘Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues’: The Daydream He Dreamed Up a Telephone Pole
The hero of Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues is a man the world has completely failed to appreciate. Fresh out of a ninety-day jail sentence for non-support, he considers himself — in Jim Croce’s gleeful phrase — an undiscovered Howard Hughes, a genius plainly destined for a corner office, cigars and an air-conditioned life.…