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How George Michael Made ‘Father Figure’: The Happy Accident That Turned a Dance Track Into a Dream
Some of the most famous recordings in pop were planned to the last detail. Father Figure was not one of them. The song that became George Michael’s hymn to longing, guilt and devotion — the track many fans still call the most sensual thing he ever made — began life as an ordinary mid-tempo dance…
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How Foreigner Made ‘Cold as Ice’: Written in One Night, in the Middle of a Blizzard
Some songs are laboured over for months. Cold as Ice was written because another song failed. In late 1976, Foreigner were deep into recording their debut album in New York when producer Gary Lyons delivered his verdict on one of the tracks planned for the record: it simply did not fit. The band — a…
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How ZZ Top Made ‘La Grange’: The Boogie That Outlived the Brothel
It opens with a mutter and a laugh — “a-how-how-how” — and then one of the most imitated guitar grooves in rock locks in and does not let go for four minutes. La Grange was ZZ Top’s first hit, the record that took a Houston bar band national, and a song with a distinction no…
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How Etta James Made ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’: The Prison Visit, the Muscle Shoals Session and the B-Side That Outlived the Hit
Most singers have a signature song they chose. Etta James had two — and the second one chose her, sideways. I’d Rather Go Blind was not a single. It was not the title of anything, and it was not the song Chess Records was promoting in the autumn of 1967. It was the flip side…
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How Electric Light Orchestra Made ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’: The Last-Minute, String-Free Song That Became Their Biggest American Hit
It is the biggest American hit Electric Light Orchestra ever had, and almost everything about it breaks the band’s own rules. Don’t Bring Me Down was written at the last minute, in the studio, by a man who usually arrived with every note finished. It was the first ELO song with no string section at…
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How Willie Nelson Made ‘Always on My Mind’: The Apology Elvis Left on a B-Side
It began as a phone call home from a man who had stayed away too long. It was written in about ten minutes, carried around unfinished for a year, completed by committee because a producer refused to record it without a bridge, and then handed to Elvis Presley — who cut it beautifully, weeks after…
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Solomon Burke: Everybody Needs Somebody to Love — The Preacher Who Became King of Rock and Soul
Solomon Burke was born James Solomon McDonald on 21 March 1940 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the first sounds around him, as later obituaries put it, were the horns and drums of a church. His family had founded its own church, the House of God for All People, and Burke grew up inside that world. He…
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How Engelbert Humperdinck Made ‘The Last Waltz’: The Rainy-Day Song That Kept the King of Romance at Number One
By the autumn of 1967, Engelbert Humperdinck had already performed the most famous giant-killing in British chart history. His Release Me, the record that made him, had spent six weeks at No. 1 in the spring and kept the Beatles’ Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever from the top — a double A-side by the…
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How Elvis Presley Made ‘Heartbreak Hotel’: The Morbid Mess That Became His First Number One
In November 1955, Elvis Presley was a twenty-year-old truck driver’s son with a handful of strange, electrifying records on a tiny Memphis label, and RCA Victor was about to pay $35,000 to buy his contract — an unheard-of sum for an unproven singer. Everything about the gamble depended on the first session for his new…
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How Whitney Houston Made ‘Greatest Love of All’: The B-Side Anthem Written by a Woman Saying Goodbye
It was the song that convinced a famous producer to believe in her, the song her label boss initially didn’t want on her album, and the song her record company first threw away on the back of another single. It was also written, nine years earlier, by a young lyricist who had just undergone a…