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How Aretha Franklin Made ‘Chain of Fools’: The Song Meant for Otis Redding That Became Her Grammy-Winning Warning
It begins with a guitar that sounds like a warning. Before Aretha Franklin sings a single word on Chain of Fools, Joe South’s tremolo guitar ripples out over a slow, circling groove, and a chorus of voices starts chanting the title — chain, chain, chain — like a verdict being read aloud. Then Franklin enters,…
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How Linda Ronstadt Made ‘You’re No Good’: The Show Closer She Nearly Threw Away
In the summer of 1974, Linda Ronstadt owed Capitol Records one last album. She had already signed with David Geffen’s Asylum label, and by every industry rule the Capitol obligation should have been a throwaway. Instead, she and producer Peter Asher spent three months crafting Heart Like a Wheel as if her whole career depended…
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How Barbra Streisand Made ‘People’: The Thirty-Minute Song Broadway Almost Threw Away
Every singer has a signature song, but few signatures were written as fast — or survived as close a call — as People. The opening line, about people who need people being the luckiest people in the world, became so completely identified with Barbra Streisand that it is easy to forget how accidental its existence…
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How Lionel Richie Made ‘Say You, Say Me’: The Oscar Winner That Wasn’t on the Soundtrack
In the autumn of 1985, Lionel Richie was arguably the most bankable songwriter alive. Can’t Slow Down had won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating Purple Rain and Born in the U.S.A.; he had co-written We Are the World and sung its opening line; and every film producer in Hollywood wanted his name…
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How Bette Midler Made ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’: The Hit She Nearly Refused
Every generation gets one song that becomes the official music of gratitude — played at graduations, retirements, weddings, and funerals, dedicated to the quiet people who hold up the loud ones. For the last thirty-five years, that song has been Wind Beneath My Wings, and it belongs, immovably, to Bette Midler. Yet the song was…
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How Louis Armstrong Made ‘Hello, Dolly!’: The Demo That Dethroned the Beatles
On December 3, 1963, Louis Armstrong walked into a New York recording studio for the first time in about two years. He was sixty-two years old, the most beloved entertainer jazz had ever produced, and he had come to do somebody a favour. His manager, Joe Glaser, had connections to a new Broadway musical that…
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How Luther Vandross Made ‘Never Too Much’: The Demo He Bankrolled Himself That Launched the Velvet Voice
For nearly a decade, Luther Vandross was the most famous anonymous voice in American music. If you listened to the radio in the late 1970s, you heard him constantly — you just didn’t know his name. He was the background singer stars begged for, the jingle voice selling Kentucky Fried Chicken and Juicy Fruit, the…
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How Barry White Made ‘It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me’: The Hit He Didn’t Write That Put Him Back on Top
Barry White was the most self-contained hitmaker in soul music. He wrote his songs, produced his records, arranged the strings, conducted the orchestra, and then stepped to the microphone to rumble over the top of it all. Which makes the biggest record of his late-seventies comeback a genuine oddity: he didn’t write it. In August…
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How Lynyrd Skynyrd Made ‘Free Bird’: A Girlfriend’s Question, a Roadie’s Piano, and the Nine-Minute Finale
Some songs are written in a flash of inspiration. Free Bird was assembled, piece by unlikely piece, over about two years — a chord progression its singer refused to touch, a first line borrowed from a guitarist’s girlfriend, a piano introduction composed by a roadie, and a guitar finale added for the most practical reason…
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How Billie Holiday Made ‘God Bless the Child’: The Song a Family Quarrel Taught Her
Most great songs are made in studios and songwriting sessions. God Bless the Child, the most famous song Billie Holiday ever helped to write, was made in a doorway, in the middle of a furious argument with her mother about money. Out of that single shouted sentence came a ballad that sounds less like a…