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The Ballad Written for Someone Else: How ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ Became the Bee Gees’ Tender Masterpiece
The Ballad Written for Someone Else: How “How Deep Is Your Love” Became the Bee Gees’ Tender Masterpiece “I know your eyes in the morning sun, I feel you touch me in the pouring rain.” Of all the records the Bee Gees made at the peak of their powers — the strutting falsetto of “Stayin’…
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God Only Knows: The 45-Minute Song That Put the Word ‘God’ on Pop Radio
God Only Knows: The 45-Minute Song That Put the Word “God” on Pop Radio In 1966, you didn’t put the word “God” in a pop song. It wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t even controversial in any organized way. It was just — not done. Pop music was about girls and cars and dancing. God belonged in…
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‘Don’t Give Me Somebody Else’s Song’: How ‘Mandy’ Made Barry Manilow a Star
“Don’t Give Me Somebody Else’s Song”: How “Mandy” Made Barry Manilow a Star On January 18, 1975, a song that its singer had not wanted to record, that had not originally been called by its title, and that had begun life as an uptempo British pop record, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.…
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The Song With No Chorus: How Anne Murray’s Tears Turned ‘You Needed Me’ Into History
The Song With No Chorus: How Anne Murray’s Tears Turned “You Needed Me” Into History Morna Anne Murray was born on June 20, 1945, in Springhill, Nova Scotia — a coal-mining town of a few thousand people, where her father was the town doctor and her mother a registered nurse. She was the only daughter…
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The Quietest Revolution of 1986: How Anita Baker’s ‘Sweet Love’ Brought Romance Back to R&B
The Quietest Revolution of 1986: How Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love” Brought Romance Back to R&B On November 1, 1986, a song reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 that, by every rule of the era, had no business being there. It wasn’t built for the radio of 1986 — no synthesizer stabs, no drum…
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The Desert Song Written in the English Rain: How America’s ‘A Horse with No Name’ Fooled Neil Young and Conquered America
The Desert Song Written in the English Rain: How America’s “A Horse with No Name” Fooled Neil Young and Conquered America Picture this: it is raining in England — that gray, sideways, unending English rain — and three teenagers, all of them Americans who have barely set foot in their own country in years, are…
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Sing Like Al Green: The Fifteen Minutes and the Eight Days Behind \”Let’s Stay Together\
Sing Like Al Green: The Fifteen Minutes and the Eight Days Behind “Let’s Stay Together” It took Al Green about fifteen minutes to write the lyrics to “Let’s Stay Together.” It took Willie Mitchell more than a hundred hours to get him to sing them. That asymmetry — a quarter of an hour of writing,…
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The Fifteen-Minute Song That Saved Two Starving Musicians: How Air Supply’s ‘Lost in Love’ Conquered America
The Fifteen-Minute Song That Saved Two Starving Musicians: How Air Supply’s “Lost in Love” Conquered America On May 12, 1975, at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney, the Australian touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar opened its doors, and two young men in the chorus found each other. One was Graham Russell, an Englishman who had…
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Dream On: The Teenage Piano Sketch That Took Steven Tyler a Decade to Believe In
Dream On: The Teenage Piano Sketch That Took Steven Tyler a Decade to Believe In In the winter of 1972, five young men from Boston were holed up in a rented house in Foxboro, Massachusetts, trying to write an album. They had a record deal with Columbia Records, a producer waiting, and almost no songs.…
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Back in Black: How AC/DC Turned a Funeral into the Biggest Rock Album Ever Made
Back in Black: How AC/DC Turned a Funeral into the Biggest Rock Album Ever Made “Back in black / I hit the sack / I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back / Yes, I’m let loose / From the noose / That’s kept me hanging about.” Every comeback in rock history is measured…