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How Eric Clapton Made ‘Cocaine’: The J.J. Cale Song That Warned Against the Drug It Seemed to Celebrate
Ask a room of rock fans who wrote Cocaine and most will name Eric Clapton without a second’s hesitation. The song is his signature as surely as the riff that opens it: that sly, loping guitar figure, the half-whispered promise that “she don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.” Yet Clapton did not write…
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How Ella Fitzgerald Made ‘Summertime’: A Lullaby, a Trumpet, and the Duet That Defined It
It begins, improbably, without her. On August 18, 1957, in a Los Angeles recording studio, Louis Armstrong raised his trumpet and played the first chorus of “Summertime” alone — slow, majestic, each note bent a little blue — while Ella Fitzgerald, the singer the session belonged to as much as him, waited her turn. When…
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How Engelbert Humperdinck Made ‘Quando Quando Quando’: The Sanremo Question He Turned Into a Lifetime Singalong
It is the simplest question a lover can ask, and Engelbert Humperdinck built one of the longest-lived numbers in his repertoire out of asking it three times in a row: when, when, when? Quando Quando Quando began life as an Italian bossa nova at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1962, travelled to America in the…
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How Electric Light Orchestra Made ‘Evil Woman’: The Hit Jeff Lynne Invented in Minutes When the Album Had None
By the spring of 1975, the Electric Light Orchestra had a problem that no amount of cellos could disguise: they had finished an album, and there was not a single on it. Face the Music was complete — eight tracks of the band’s most sophisticated work — but as Jeff Lynne listened back at Musicland…
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How Elvis Presley Made ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’: The 177-Year-Old Melody He Turned Into His Farewell
Some Elvis Presley records announce themselves. This one barely raises its voice. Can’t Help Falling in Love lasts less than three minutes, moves at a gentle sway and contains not a single moment of rock and roll swagger, yet it became one of the most durable recordings of his entire career: a wedding standard, a…
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How Elton John Made ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’: The Ballad He Tried to Give Away
Few singers have argued with their own masterpiece as stubbornly as Elton John argued with this one. “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” is now one of the defining ballads of his career — a vast, pleading song about a relationship going dark, built to be sung back at him by thousands of…
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How Eagles Made ‘Lyin’ Eyes’: The Cocktail Napkin That Became Their First Grammy
It started as a joke at a restaurant table. A beautiful young woman walked into Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood with a much older, very wealthy man, somebody at the table made the observation that became the title, and within weeks the Eagles had the song that would win them their first Grammy. Lyin’ Eyes…
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How Earth, Wind & Fire Made ‘Fantasy’: The Night a Close Encounter Finished the Lyrics
“Fantasy” took about three months to finish, and nearly all of that time was spent stuck. The music came together in the studio, layer upon layer, exactly as Maurice White planned it. The words would not come at all — until the band’s leader walked into a cinema, watched a film about visitors from the…
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How Dusty Springfield Made ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’: The Album Track a New York DJ Refused to Let Die
Dusty Springfield did not find “Wishin’ and Hopin’” in a publisher’s office or at the top of the charts. She found it the way fans find songs: on somebody else’s album, buried as a track almost nobody had noticed, sung by a singer she already admired from across the Atlantic. The song had been written…
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How Duran Duran Made ‘The Reflex’: The Remix That Turned a Buried Album Track Into a Transatlantic No. 1
The strangest thing about “The Reflex” is that Duran Duran’s biggest single of the 1980s very nearly never sounded like a single at all. On the album where listeners first heard it, the song ran for five and a half minutes, dense, restless and deliberately odd, its chorus arriving like a riddle rather than a…