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How Pat Benatar Turned a Rejected Movie Song into “Shadows of the Night”: The Making of a Grammy-Winning Masterpiece
Every hit song has a backstory, but few have one as improbable as “Shadows of the Night.” It began life as a castoff — written for a movie that didn’t want it, released by a label that didn’t believe in it, and recorded twice by other singers before it ever reached the woman who would…
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Ann and Nancy Wilson: The Sisters at the Heart of Heart
Before they were rock stars, they were just Ann and Nancy — two sisters in a military family that never stayed anywhere long, finding stability in the one thing that moved with them: music itself. One with a voice that could strip paint, the other with a guitar that could sing — and a bond…
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How Heart Turned a Twice-Rejected Song Into “Alone”, the Biggest Hit of 1987
Some songs arrive like lightning. “Alone” arrived like a boomerang — thrown away twice before it finally came back and hit the bullseye. Written by two jobbing songwriters, recorded and forgotten in 1983, warbled by a sitcom star in 1984, it was gathering dust in a drawer when Heart got hold of it. Nobody —…
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Brian Wilson: The Genius Who Found His Way Back
He heard music nobody else could hear — symphonies in surf songs, cathedrals in three-minute pop records. And he heard other things, too: voices that weren’t there, torments that never stopped. Brian Wilson’s life is the most beautiful and most heartbreaking story in American popular music. It is a story of a gift so large…
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Good Vibrations: How Brian Wilson Built Pop’s Pocket Symphony
Three minutes and thirty-five seconds. That’s all it is — barely longer than the average pop song, shorter than most album tracks today. But “Good Vibrations” contains more musical ideas than most albums, took eight months and at least four studios to assemble, cost more than any single ever recorded at the time, and changed…
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Otis Williams: The Last Temp Standing
Everybody dies by the end of the Temptations’ story. Everybody except Otis Williams. He has buried his bandmates, buried his son, survived nearly thirty lineup changes, three marriages, the murder of Dr. King, and six decades of an industry that chews people up. And at an age when most men are long retired, he is…
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How the Temptations Created “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”: The Twelve-Minute Masterpiece Nobody Wanted to Record
It is one of the strangest stories in Motown history. In 1972, producer Norman Whitfield took a song that had already flopped for another group, stretched it to nearly twelve minutes — with an instrumental opening so long that radio programmers must have thought he’d lost his mind — and handed it to a band…
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U2: The Hearts Behind the Biggest Band on Earth
The world knows U2 as the biggest band on the planet — the stadium anthems, the 22 Grammys, the tours that rewrote the record books. But behind the spectacle are four men who have lived remarkably human lives: a schoolboy romance that became rock’s most enduring marriage, a guitarist who waited years for a divorce…
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U2’s Rain-Soaked Night at Red Rocks: The Concert That Made Them Legends
Every great band has a night when everything goes wrong — and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them. For U2, that night was June 5, 1983, at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver, Colorado. The rain was relentless, a cold mountain downpour that turned the stage into a…
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Tom Petty: The Tender Heart Behind the Rebel
On stage, Tom Petty was the picture of defiance — the sneer, the Rickenbacker, the man who sang “I Won’t Back Down” and meant every syllable. But offstage, those who knew him tell a different story. They describe a shy, sentimental man who carried old wounds, loved his family fiercely, and fought private battles that…