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How Toto Made ‘Rosanna’: The Borrowed Groove That Won Record of the Year
The biggest album of Toto’s career does not begin with a voice, a guitar, or a keyboard. It begins with a drum kit, entirely alone, playing a lopsided, ghost-noted shuffle that drummers have been trying to copy ever since. Two bars of drums — then the horns, the keyboards, and the voices pile in, and…
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The Supremes: Where Did Our Love Go (1964) and the Motown Machine
In the summer of 1964, American pop radio was crowded with guitars from Liverpool and London. The British Invasion was not a metaphor that year; it was a weekly chart reality, with new groups arriving, new accents on the radio, and new ideas about what a pop band should look and sound like. Into that…
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How Donna Summer Made ‘Last Dance’: The Bathroom Pitch, the One-Day Session, and the Night Disco Won an Oscar
It begins as a ballad — a slow, pleading torch song, a woman asking for one final romance before the night is over. Then the beat drops, the strings surge, and it turns into one of the most euphoric dance records ever made. Last Dance, recorded for the 1978 film Thank God It’s Friday, did…
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How Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Made ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’: The Indiana Girl Who Became Rock’s Most Mysterious Goodbye
There is a special kind of confidence in burying a brand-new classic inside a greatest-hits album. In November 1993, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released Greatest Hits, a career summary that stretched from Breakdown to Free Fallin’ — and tucked into it was a song that would out-chart almost everything around it. Mary Jane’s Last…
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How Don McLean Made ‘And I Love You So’: The B-Side That Became a Standard
Don McLean will always be introduced the same way: the man who wrote American Pie. But ask singers rather than fans, and a different title keeps coming up. And I Love You So, a quiet love ballad from his debut album, may be the most recorded song he ever wrote. Perry Como took it into…
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The Ronettes: Be My Baby — Three Minutes That Built Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound
Few records announce themselves as boldly as “Be My Baby.” Before a voice is heard, there is a drum pattern — a sharp crack, a pause, then the same crack again — that has become one of the most recognised openings in all of pop music. Then the orchestra rushes in, the backing voices swell,…
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How Dusty Springfield Made ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Italian Song She Refused to Let Go
Some of the biggest hits in pop begin as accidents of travel. In January 1965, Dusty Springfield went to Italy to sing at the Sanremo Festival, the great annual showcase of Italian song, and heard a soaring ballad performed by its composer, Pino Donaggio, and by the American singer Jody Miller. The song was Io…
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How Van Morrison Made ‘Brown Eyed Girl’: The Signature Song He Signed Away
It is one of the most played songs of the twentieth century — three minutes of summer nostalgia that have soundtracked weddings, films, and ten million American radio broadcasts. It made Van Morrison a solo star. And by Morrison’s own account, he never received a single royalty for writing or recording it, because he had…
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The Shirelles: Will You Love Me Tomorrow — The Question That Made Girl-Group History
In the winter of 1960 to 1961, a new sound reached the top of the American charts, and it did not come from a solo crooner, a rock-and-roll wild man, or a polished male harmony group. It came from four young women from Passaic, New Jersey, singing a question that millions of listeners recognised at…
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How Duran Duran Made ‘Ordinary World’: The Grief Song That Rescued a Band the World Had Written Off
By the end of 1992, Duran Duran were supposed to be over. The defining pin-ups of the MTV decade had watched the eighties end and take their audience with it; their previous album had flopped, grunge owned the radio, and the band that remained was a trio playing to a fraction of its former crowd.…