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How the Carpenters Created “A Song for You”: The Masterpiece They Built Like a Cathedral
In the spring of 1972, the Carpenters were the biggest-selling act in America and they were running on fumes. Three hit albums in three years, a touring schedule that never stopped, television specials, award shows, and a new record contract obligation glaring at them from the calendar. Most acts in that position would have thrown…
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Kenny Rogers: The Gambler’s Other Passion — The Camera, the Cause, and the Man Behind the Beard
Everyone knows the beard, the voice, the story-songs. But Kenny Rogers spent his life insisting he was more than the Gambler — and he had the evidence to prove it. Behind the sequined jackets was a serious photographer who studied with a disciple of Ansel Adams, published three books of his work, and earned a…
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The Night Nashville Said Goodbye: How “All In for the Gambler” Became Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Farewell
On October 25, 2017, Kenny Rogers walked onto the stage at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena knowing it was the last time. Not the last time on a stage — his farewell tour still had dates to play — but the last time the whole world would gather in one room to say what he meant to…
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The Daughter Who Brought Terry Kath Home: Michelle’s Film, Kiefer’s Toast, and the Empty Chair
Terry Kath died on January 23, 1978, a week shy of his thirty-second birthday, leaving behind a twenty-month-old daughter who would grow up knowing him only through photographs, stories, and other people’s tears. For nearly forty years, that was the end of the story: the brilliant guitarist, gone too soon, fading a little more with…
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How Chicago Recorded a Double Album in Ten Days: The Story Behind “The Chicago Transit Authority”
In late January 1969, seven unknown musicians from Chicago walked into CBS’s 30th Street Studio in New York City — the church-like former chapel where Miles Davis and Leonard Bernstein had recorded — and cut their entire debut album in ten days. They worked the graveyard shift, midnight to eight in the morning, because Simon…
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The McVies of Fleetwood Mac: The Quiet Heart of Rock’s Loudest Band
Every legendary band has a center of gravity — the person who holds the chaos together while everyone else flies apart. In Fleetwood Mac, the loudest, wildest, most gloriously dysfunctional band of the seventies, that person was Christine McVie: the keyboardist with the warm contralto, the writer of “Don’t Stop” and “Say You Love Me,”…
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How Fleetwood Mac Made Their Second Debut: The Story Behind the 1975 “White Album”
Before “Rumours” sold forty million copies, before the cocaine and the breakups and the legend, there was a quieter miracle: a struggling British blues band, eight years old and on its tenth album, walked into a studio in the San Fernando Valley with two unknown Californians and walked out with the record that saved its…
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Carly Simon: The Heart Behind the Hits — Love, Loss, and the Long Road Home
For five decades, Carly Simon has been famous for saying the unsayable — about vanity, about marriage, about desire — in songs so elegant you almost missed how blunt they were. But the life behind the songs has been quieter, harder, and in many ways braver than the records suggest. Two marriages. A battle with…
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How Carly Simon Made Her Debut: The Story Behind “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”
In the spring of 1971, a twenty-seven-year-old woman with a stutter she had sung her way out of, a terror of the stage, and no particular plan to become a star released a debut album that opened with one of the bleakest hit singles of the decade. It was a song about marriage that made…
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James Taylor: The Family That Sang Him Home
James Taylor has always sung about family — the ache of it, the comfort of it, the people who hold you when the world won’t. But the family behind the songs is a saga worthy of its own album: a surgeon father and a singing mother who raised five musical children, a beloved older brother…