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How the Eagles Created “Desperado”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
It was never released as a single. It stalled at number forty-one on the album chart. And yet “Desperado” — the title track of the Eagles’ 1973 concept album — became the song that defined the band for half a century, the closer at nearly every concert they ever played, and one of the most…
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Donna Summer: The Heart Behind the Hits — Faith, Family, and the Fight to Be Herself
The world knew Donna Summer as the Queen of Disco — the voice that moaned through “Love to Love You Baby,” the body on the “Bad Girls” album cover, the fantasy the industry sold by the million. But the woman behind the fantasy was someone else entirely: a devout church girl from Boston who became…
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How Donna Summer Created “Bad Girls”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
In 1977, Donna Summer’s secretary walked out of the Casablanca Records office onto Sunset Boulevard to run an errand — and was mistaken for a streetwalker by the Los Angeles police. That misunderstanding, absurd and a little dangerous, became one of the biggest disco anthems ever recorded. “Bad Girls” — five weeks at number one,…
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Dolly Parton: The Love of Her Life — Carl Dean and the Private Heart of a Public Legend
Dolly Parton sang about love for sixty years — “I Will Always Love You,” “Jolene,” “Islands in the Stream,” “Love Is Like a Butterfly” — but the greatest love story of her life was one she almost never talked about. For nearly fifty-nine years, she was married to Carl Thomas Dean, a man who never…
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How Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris Created “Trio”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
On January 19, 1986 — her fortieth birthday — Dolly Parton walked into a Los Angeles recording studio with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt and started singing, and American music has been harmonizing ever since. It had taken more than a decade to get there. Record labels had blocked them, managers had scoffed, schedules had…
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Diana Ross: The Mother Behind the Diva — Five Children, Two Marriages, One Unbreakable Bond
For sixty years, the world has watched Diana Ross command stages, survive storms, and embody glamour itself. But ask the people closest to her what she is proudest of, and the answer is never the records or the awards. It is the five children she raised mostly on her own, the family she held together…
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How Diana Ross Created “Theme From Mahogany”: The Story Behind the Ballad That Outshone the Movie
In the autumn of 1975, Diana Ross was the biggest Black female star in the world — and she was in trouble. Her second film, “Mahogany,” was a mess behind the scenes: its director had been fired, its budget was ballooning, and its star was carrying the entire production on her shoulders, even designing two…
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How Bruce Springsteen Made “Born to Run”: The Album That Was His Last Chance
In the spring of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was 25 years old, two albums deep, critically adored, commercially stalled — and out of chances. His label was losing money on him. His manager was fighting lawsuits that would soon paralyze his career. The rock press called him the future, but the future wasn’t selling records. So…
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Cyndi Lauper: The Rebel With a Cause — Love, Motherhood, and the Fight for Every Outsider
The world met Cyndi Lauper as a burst of neon — orange hair, thrift-store layers, a voice that could shatter glass and mend hearts in the same song. But the neon was never the point. It was armor, and underneath it was a girl from Queens who had learned early that the world is hard…
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How Cyndi Lauper Created “She’s So Unusual”: The Story Behind Pop’s Most Daring Debut
In the winter of 1982, a 29-year-old singer walked into New York’s Record Plant with a voice that had twice been declared dead, a bankruptcy still fresh on her record, and a head full of thrift-store fashion. She was, by every industry metric, a terrible bet: too old at twenty-nine, too weird, too broke, too…