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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 Billy Ocean Made ‘Caribbean Queen’: The Hit With Three Names
Every hit record has a story, but Caribbean Queen has something rarer: three stories, under three different titles, on three different continents. The song that made Billy Ocean an international star in 1984 first flopped in Britain as European Queen, then conquered America as Caribbean Queen, while a third version, African Queen, charted in South…
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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…
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How Marvin Gaye Made ‘Let’s Get It On’: The Rehab Prayer That Became Soul’s Greatest Seduction
The most famous invitation in soul music began as a prayer of thanksgiving. When Ed Townsend first sketched out Let’s Get It On, he had just come out of a rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, and the song he heard in his head was a religious one — a man urging himself to get on with…
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How Black Sabbath Made ‘Paranoid’: The Two-Hour Filler That Became a Metal Anthem
The most famous song Black Sabbath ever recorded was an afterthought. Paranoid — the title track of their second album, their biggest single, the riff every young guitarist learns — was written in a rush in June 1970 to fill a gap on a record that was already effectively finished. The band needed about three…