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How Cat Stevens Created “Tea for the Tillerman”: The Eleven Songs That Made a Superstar
In the spring of 1970, a twenty-one-year-old who had nearly died two years earlier walked into a London studio with a pocketful of new songs and a second chance at life. Seven months later, he walked out with an album that would define the entire singer-songwriter era. “Tea for the Tillerman” was not just a…
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Tom Scholz: The Heart Behind the Hits — The Engineer Who Gave Away Millions
Tom Scholz is the most unlikely rock star in history. He didn’t want to be famous — he wanted to build things. An MIT-trained engineer who recorded one of the best-selling debut albums of all time in his basement, invented a legendary guitar device, learned to fly airplanes, played competitive basketball for 35 years, and…
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Boston (1976): How Tom Scholz Built a Masterpiece in a Basement and Fooled the Record Label
It is the greatest con in the history of rock and roll — and it produced one of the greatest debut albums ever made. In 1975, Epic Records signed a Boston band on the condition that they record their album in a proper professional studio in Los Angeles. The band’s mastermind, Tom Scholz, nodded agreeably…
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The Two Captains of the Cars: Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr — Love, Estrangement, and the Songs Left Behind
Every great band has a creative engine, and the Cars had two — pulling in different directions, which was exactly the point. Ric Ocasek wrote the songs: wiry, anxious, brilliant, full of romantic static. Benjamin Orr sang the pretty ones: “Just What I Needed,” “Let’s Go,” “Drive,” the voice that made teenage hearts stop and…
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The Cars (1978): How a Boston Bar Band and a Queen Producer Made the Perfect Debut
Some debut albums sound like a band searching for itself. The Cars sounds like a band that already knew exactly who it was — and was impatient for the rest of us to catch up. Released on June 6, 1978, it spent 139 weeks on the Billboard chart, sold six million copies, and remains one…
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Kim Carnes: The Heart Behind the Hits — Sixty Years of Love, Nashville Roots, and Quiet Strength
In an industry famous for burning through marriages the way it burns through singles, Kim Carnes has been married to the same man since 1967. Let that sink in: while the music business was inventing and discarding trends around her — folk, country-rock, disco, new wave, MTV — she went home to Dave Ellingson. Through…
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Mistaken Identity: How Kim Carnes Made an Album That Outshone Its Own Biggest Hit
Everybody knows “Bette Davis Eyes.” It was the biggest single of 1981, nine weeks at number one, a Grammy Record of the Year, the song that made Kim Carnes’ raspy voice one of the most recognizable sounds on earth. But here is the thing about Mistaken Identity, the album that contained it: the album is…
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Boz Scaggs: The Heart Behind the Hits — Love, Loss, Wine, and Fire
Boz Scaggs sings like a man who has lived — because he has. Behind the silky voice and the immaculate suits is a life marked by the things that mark all of us: marriages that didn’t last and one that did, children who found their way and one who didn’t, a vineyard built with love…
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Silk Degrees: How Boz Scaggs and a Band of Unknown Kids Made the Smoothest Album of 1976
In the fall of 1975, Boz Scaggs was a 31-year-old singer with a beautiful voice, a Texas drawl, and a career going nowhere. He had been in the Steve Miller Band. He had made a series of critically admired solo albums that hardly anyone bought. His label, Columbia, was losing patience. One more flop and…
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Nile Rodgers: The Heart Behind the Hits — Addiction, Cancer, and the Will to Keep Playing
If you only know Nile Rodgers as the smiling man with the white Stratocaster — the hitmaker behind “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “Let’s Dance,” and “Get Lucky” — you know the least interesting part of his story. Behind the most successful second act in pop music stands a man who survived a childhood of chaos,…