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How Journey Created “Escape”: The Album That Made Them Immortal
In the spring of 1981, Journey walked into Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, with a new keyboard player, two veteran producers, and ten songs that would change rock history. They walked out a few months later with Escape — the seventh album of their career, and the one that gave the world “Don’t Stop Believin’,”…
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Duran Duran: The Hearts Behind the Haircuts
They were the prettiest band in the world, and the press never let them forget it. For forty years, Duran Duran’s story has been told in yachts and videos and eyeliner — the Second British Invasion, the supermodels, the million-dollar videos. But the human story underneath is far more interesting, and far more moving. A…
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How Duran Duran Created “Rio”: The Album That Conquered the World
It is the definitive album of the New Romantic era — nine songs, forty minutes, and a painted cover of a woman with a cherry-red smile. Rio took Duran Duran from British pop hopefuls to global superstars, invented the modern music video as an art form, and gave the 1980s its soundtrack. But the album…
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Sade: The Woman Behind the Silence
She is the most private star in pop music — a woman who has given fewer interviews in forty years than most celebrities give in a month. Sade Adu has sold tens of millions of records while living like someone determined to be forgotten by the gossip columns. But behind the silence is a rich,…
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How Sade Created “Love Deluxe”: The Mermaid, the Silence, and the Masterpiece
In 1992, after four years of near-total silence, Sade returned with a song that sounded like it was recorded at the bottom of the ocean — and a video in which she played a mermaid who wanted to be a bride. “No Ordinary Love” was seven minutes of bass-heavy longing that bore almost no resemblance…
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Debbie Harry & Chris Stein: The Love Story That Outlived Blondie
Every great band has a love story at its center, but Blondie’s is unusual: the romance ended decades ago, and the love never did. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were partners in every sense — lovers, bandmates, co-writers, co-conspirators — from the early 1970s until 1987. Then the romance stopped, the band broke up, illness…
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How Blondie Made “Parallel Lines”: Six Weeks at the Record Plant That Changed Pop
In the summer of 1978, Blondie walked into New York’s Record Plant studios as a cult band with two flop albums and walked out six weeks later with one of the greatest pop records ever made. “Parallel Lines” — all eleven tracks of sleek, sparkling, bulletproof songwriting — would give them their first American No.…
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Queen: The Heart Behind the Hits
For all the stadium thunder, the mustaches, and the anthems, Queen’s story is really a story about loyalty. A singer who left his fortune to the woman he called his wife. A guitarist who spends his fame fighting for badgers. A band that turned its grief into a charity that has saved lives on five…
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The Night Queen Conquered Wembley: July 1986 and the Last Great Stadium Stand
Nobody in Wembley Stadium on the night of July 12, 1986, knew they were witnessing the end of an era. How could they? Freddie Mercury was at the absolute peak of his powers, commanding 72,000 people like a conductor commands an orchestra, in a white vest and a grin that could power the floodlights. Queen…
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ABBA: Four Lives After the Lights Went Down
When ABBA stopped, they really stopped. No farewell tour, no press conference, no slow fade into the oldies circuit — just silence, starting in 1982, that would last the better part of forty years. The world assumed the four Swedes had simply retired into their millions. The truth is more interesting, and more human: each…