-
How James Brown Made ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’: One Take in Charlotte That Invented Funk
On the first day of February 1965, the hardest-working band in show business limped into a recording studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, somewhere between one show and the next. James Brown and his orchestra were in the middle of a road grind that would have flattened lesser men, and Brown had a new song he…
-
How Janet Jackson Made ‘Escapade’: The Motown Cover That Became an Original
Escapade exists because Janet Jackson changed her mind about a cover version. In 1989 she was in Minneapolis with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, building the album that became Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and she had an idea she loved: she wanted to remake Nowhere to Run, the 1965 Martha and the Vandellas stormer…
-
How Jackson Browne Made ‘Somebody’s Baby’: The Teen-Movie Favour That Became His Biggest Hit
Jackson Browne built his reputation on weight: songs about mortality, politics, lost love and the long American comedown of the 1970s, sung like diary entries he had barely survived. So the strangest line in his catalogue is also the simplest. The biggest hit of his career — the highest-charting single he ever released in the…
-
How Helen Reddy Made ‘Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady’: The Airplane Napkin That Became Her Final Top 10 Hit
In the summer of 1975, Helen Reddy was about as famous as a singer could be. The Australian who had arrived in New York with a small child and almost no money now had three No. 1 singles behind her, a Grammy on the shelf, and a semi-regular host’s chair on The Midnight Special. I…
-
How Heart Made ‘What About Love’: The Rejected Demo That Restarted Their Career
The most important Heart record of the 1980s began as somebody else’s reject. What About Love was written in a Toronto basement in about three hours, voted off the album it was written for by the band that recorded it first, and then shelved for three years. When it finally reached Ann and Nancy Wilson,…
-
How Gordon Lightfoot Made ‘Early Morning Rain’: The Airport-Fence Song Other People Made Famous First
Gordon Lightfoot’s most famous song began as an image he could not shake: a young Canadian standing in the rain at the fence of Los Angeles International Airport, watching airliners climb into the grey, knowing he had no money for a ticket home. He carried the picture around for four years before it became Early…
-
How Hall & Oates Made ‘I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)’: The Drum-Machine Groove Michael Jackson Borrowed
The band had gone home. It was one night in March 1981 at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York, and after a long day working on their tenth album, Private Eyes, Daryl Hall and John Oates were the last musicians left in the room, along with engineer and co-producer Neil Kernon and a…
-
How Gloria Gaynor Made ‘Honey Bee’: The Single She Bought Back From Her Own Label
Everybody knows how Gloria Gaynor’s story is supposed to start: with I Will Survive, the B-side that ate the world in 1979. But Gaynor’s recording career has a stranger, earlier first chapter — a record she made for one label, watched that label abandon, bought back, and sold to another label, all before most of…
-
How George Michael Made ‘One More Try’: The Six-Minute Ballad He Wrote and Recorded in Eight Hours
George Michael was a perfectionist who could spend weeks worrying over a single sound, and the defining album of his solo career, Faith, was built that way — written, produced and largely played by Michael himself across months of sessions in London and Denmark. Yet the record’s most naked moment arrived almost by accident. One…
-
How Glen Campbell Made ‘Galveston’: The B-Side Don Ho Gave Away That Became a Soldier’s Anthem
In the last week of February 1969, American radio was full of the war. The fighting in Vietnam led the news every night, and the pop charts carried the tension in coded forms — in protest records, in escapist ones, in the strange new seriousness of country music crossing over. Into that moment stepped Glen…