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How George Harrison Made ‘All Those Years Ago’: The Song Ringo Turned Down That Reunited the Beatles
The first record to reunite the surviving Beatles began as a song Ringo Starr did not want. In November 1980, George Harrison wrote and recorded All Those Years Ago for Starr to sing on his next album; Starr cut a vocal, decided the song sat too high for his voice, disliked the lyric, and gave…
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How Gladys Knight & the Pips Made ‘Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’: The Country Ballad That Became a Soul Standard
By the spring of 1974, Gladys Knight & the Pips were in the middle of the most glorious second act in soul music. Written off at Motown, reborn at Buddah Records, they had just topped every chart in America with Midnight Train to Georgia. The record that confirmed it was no fluke was not a…
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How Genesis Made ‘Turn It On Again’: The Solo-Album Leftovers That Became a Hit
Some hits are written. Turn It On Again was salvaged. The song that carried Genesis into the 1980s — their second British Top 10 single, the signature track of the album that first took them to No. 1 at home — was assembled from two pieces of music that Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford had…
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How Foreigner Made ‘Feels Like the First Time’: The Demo Song Every Label Turned Down
In March 1977, a band nobody had heard of released its first single, and within four months that single had climbed to No. 4 in America and announced one of the defining arena-rock acts of the next decade. Yet a year earlier, Feels Like the First Time had been the centrepiece of a demo tape…
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How Eurythmics Made ‘There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)’: The Stevie Wonder Session Behind Their Only UK Number One
Eurythmics built their reputation on ice: synthesisers, detachment, Annie Lennox’s cropped orange hair and androgynous stare. So the warmest, most joyful record of their career arrived as a kind of beautiful contradiction. There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart), released in the summer of 1985, is a gospel-tinged celebration that opens with Lennox…
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How Etta James Made ‘Something’s Got a Hold on Me’: The Gospel Shout That Dance Music Rediscovered Fifty Years Later
In 1962, Etta James was best known as a singer of other people’s heartbreak, wrapped in strings. Her signature record, At Last, had made her the voice of elegant longing, and her label, Chess Records, was content to keep her in ballads. Then, on a single drawn from her self-titled third album, she opened her…
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How Fleetwood Mac Made ‘Don’t Stop’: The Breakup Song a President Turned Into a Reunion
Rumours is famous as the album a band made while falling apart: two couples splitting, a drummer divorcing, everyone singing their grievances at each other through the glass of the control room. But its most buoyant song came from the member who refused to write a grievance at all. Christine McVie, whose eight-year marriage to…
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How Eric Clapton Made ‘Cocaine’: The J.J. Cale Song That Warned Against the Drug It Seemed to Celebrate
Ask a room of rock fans who wrote Cocaine and most will name Eric Clapton without a second’s hesitation. The song is his signature as surely as the riff that opens it: that sly, loping guitar figure, the half-whispered promise that “she don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.” Yet Clapton did not write…
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How Ella Fitzgerald Made ‘Summertime’: A Lullaby, a Trumpet, and the Duet That Defined It
It begins, improbably, without her. On August 18, 1957, in a Los Angeles recording studio, Louis Armstrong raised his trumpet and played the first chorus of “Summertime” alone — slow, majestic, each note bent a little blue — while Ella Fitzgerald, the singer the session belonged to as much as him, waited her turn. When…
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How Engelbert Humperdinck Made ‘Quando Quando Quando’: The Sanremo Question He Turned Into a Lifetime Singalong
It is the simplest question a lover can ask, and Engelbert Humperdinck built one of the longest-lived numbers in his repertoire out of asking it three times in a row: when, when, when? Quando Quando Quando began life as an Italian bossa nova at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1962, travelled to America in the…