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How Electric Light Orchestra Made ‘Evil Woman’: The Hit Jeff Lynne Invented in Minutes When the Album Had None
By the spring of 1975, the Electric Light Orchestra had a problem that no amount of cellos could disguise: they had finished an album, and there was not a single on it. Face the Music was complete — eight tracks of the band’s most sophisticated work — but as Jeff Lynne listened back at Musicland…
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How Elvis Presley Made ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’: The 177-Year-Old Melody He Turned Into His Farewell
Some Elvis Presley records announce themselves. This one barely raises its voice. Can’t Help Falling in Love lasts less than three minutes, moves at a gentle sway and contains not a single moment of rock and roll swagger, yet it became one of the most durable recordings of his entire career: a wedding standard, a…
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How Elton John Made ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’: The Ballad He Tried to Give Away
Few singers have argued with their own masterpiece as stubbornly as Elton John argued with this one. “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” is now one of the defining ballads of his career — a vast, pleading song about a relationship going dark, built to be sung back at him by thousands of…
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How Eagles Made ‘Lyin’ Eyes’: The Cocktail Napkin That Became Their First Grammy
It started as a joke at a restaurant table. A beautiful young woman walked into Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood with a much older, very wealthy man, somebody at the table made the observation that became the title, and within weeks the Eagles had the song that would win them their first Grammy. Lyin’ Eyes…
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How Earth, Wind & Fire Made ‘Fantasy’: The Night a Close Encounter Finished the Lyrics
“Fantasy” took about three months to finish, and nearly all of that time was spent stuck. The music came together in the studio, layer upon layer, exactly as Maurice White planned it. The words would not come at all — until the band’s leader walked into a cinema, watched a film about visitors from the…
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How Dusty Springfield Made ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’: The Album Track a New York DJ Refused to Let Die
Dusty Springfield did not find “Wishin’ and Hopin’” in a publisher’s office or at the top of the charts. She found it the way fans find songs: on somebody else’s album, buried as a track almost nobody had noticed, sung by a singer she already admired from across the Atlantic. The song had been written…
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How Duran Duran Made ‘The Reflex’: The Remix That Turned a Buried Album Track Into a Transatlantic No. 1
The strangest thing about “The Reflex” is that Duran Duran’s biggest single of the 1980s very nearly never sounded like a single at all. On the album where listeners first heard it, the song ran for five and a half minutes, dense, restless and deliberately odd, its chorus arriving like a riddle rather than a…
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How Donna Summer Made ‘Hot Stuff’: The Night the Queen of Disco Won Rock’s Crown
By the start of 1979, Donna Summer was the undisputed Queen of Disco, and disco itself was starting to look like a kingdom with no future. Rock radio would not touch it, punk and new wave were circling, and Summer’s producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, had decided her next album would not simply defend…
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How Don McLean Made ‘Empty Chairs’: The Breakup Ballad That Quietly Gave Birth to ‘Killing Me Softly’
It is the quietest famous thing Don McLean ever did. American Pie, released in October 1971, was built around an eight-and-a-half-minute title track that rewrote rock and roll history as allegory, and it contained Vincent, his luminous portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Between those two monuments sat a song of three minutes and twenty-four seconds…
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How Dire Straits Made ‘Romeo and Juliet’: The Breakup, the Resonator and the Girl Who Found Somebody New
William Shakespeare’s lovers were kept apart by their families. Mark Knopfler’s were kept apart by something more modern: fame. “Romeo and Juliet”, the tender centrepiece of Dire Straits’ third album Making Movies, retells the oldest love story in English as a small, sad scene from the music business — a streetwise Romeo, still singing under…