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How Andy Williams Made ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’: The Song He Nearly Turned Down
In the spring of 1963, the smoothest voice in America sang a song about a man who could not get over a woman, and America could not get over the song. Can’t Get Used to Losing You lasts barely two minutes and twenty seconds, yet it held the No. 2 spot on the Billboard Hot…
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How Aretha Franklin Made ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)’: One Day in Muscle Shoals That Ended in a Brawl
On the morning of 24 January 1967, a twenty-four-year-old singer with nine failed albums behind her walked into a small studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, sat down at a piano, and started to sing. By the end of that single day, Aretha Franklin had recorded the song that would turn her into the Queen of…
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How Aerosmith Made ‘Love in an Elevator’: The Song That Started When the Doors Opened
Most hit songs begin with a melody or a title. Aerosmith’s first single of the Pump era began with embarrassment — Steven Tyler, a hotel elevator, a beautiful woman, and a set of doors that opened at exactly the wrong moment. By 1989 the band were two years into the most improbable second act in…
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How America Made ‘Lonely People’: The Newlywed’s Answer to ‘Eleanor Rigby’
Most answer songs pick a fight. Lonely People starts one gently and then refuses to finish it. In 1966 the Beatles had asked, twice over, where all the lonely people come from and where they all belong, and had left the question hanging in the air of Eleanor Rigby. Eight years later, a newly married…
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How Al Green Made ‘Love and Happiness’: Five Taps on a Coca-Cola Crate and the Groove Willie Mitchell Had to Stop
It begins with almost nothing. A soft croon, barely a breath of melody, and then five dry taps — a man’s foot coming down on an old Coca-Cola crate on the floor of a Memphis studio. Only after those five taps does the guitar arrive, one of the most imitated licks in soul music, and…
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How AC/DC Made ‘Thunderstruck’: The Little Guitar Trick That Shook the World
In 1990, AC/DC badly needed a comeback. The Australian band that had opened the decade with Back in Black had spent the late eighties sliding down the bill, and their recent albums had sold on loyalty rather than excitement. So they flew to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, hired Bruce Fairbairn — the producer…
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How Air Supply Made ‘Making Love Out of Nothing at All’: The Ballad Blocked by Its Own Songwriter
By 1983, Air Supply were the undisputed kings of the soft-rock ballad — two Australians and a string of featherweight hits about love, loss and longing. But the biggest record of their career was not written by Graham Russell, the duo’s own songwriter. It arrived almost by accident, courtesy of the least featherweight figure in…
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How ABBA Made ‘Chiquitita’: The Song They Gave Away to the World’s Children
By December 1978, ABBA were arguably the biggest pop group on Earth, and they were building the album that would become Voulez-Vous in the most advanced recording studio in Scandinavia — their own Polar Studios in Stockholm, converted from a vacant cinema. The sessions had been running since March, and the album was nearly finished.…
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How Helen Reddy Made ‘Delta Dawn’: The Rejected Track Three Singers Fought Over
In the summer of 1973, the most contested song in America belonged to a woman who had almost nothing to do with recording it. Delta Dawn — a Southern Gothic miniature about a faded belle in Brownsville, Tennessee, still walking downtown with a suitcase in her hand, waiting for the lover who left her decades…
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How Heart Made ‘These Dreams’: The Song Stevie Nicks Turned Down and Nancy Wilson Sang With a Cold
Heart’s first No. 1 single was a song the band did not write, offered first to a singer who did not want it, and sung — for the first time on a Heart single — by the sister who was not supposed to sing lead. These Dreams arrived in the middle of the most calculated…