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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 Neil Diamond Made ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’: The Bottle of Wine That Became His First Number One
For more than half a century, listeners have pictured her the same way: a free-spirited woman with a smile that could rescue a lonely Saturday night. But Cracklin’ Rosie was never a woman at all. She was a bottle — a cheap, lightly sparkling rosé wine that lonely men on a Canadian reservation bought at…
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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…
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How Madonna Made ‘Like a Prayer’: The Gospel Confession That Cost Pepsi Its Nerve and Shook the Vatican
In March 1989, Madonna performed the most efficient vanishing act in pop history: she took a soft-drink company’s $5 million, gave them a wholesome commercial they could only air for about a day, and watched them cancel the deal while she kept the money. But the scandal that swallowed the headlines has always obscured the…
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How Pat Benatar Made ‘Love Is a Battlefield’: The Slow Ballad Her Husband Refused to Leave Alone
By the summer of 1983, Pat Benatar had nothing left to prove. Four albums in four years had produced Heartbreaker, Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Promises in the Dark and Shadows of the Night, and her voice — a mezzo-soprano trained for opera and then aimed like a weapon at rock and roll —…
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How Bobby Darin Made ‘Dream Lover’: The Song He Wrote at the Piano and Stretched Into a Standard
Bobby Darin did not find Dream Lover. He built it, at a piano, out of a handful of chord changes he could not stop playing — and then, in the studio, he did the thing that separated him from every other teen idol of 1959: he made it bigger. Strings, voices, a swaying, sophisticated arrangement…