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How Donna Summer Made ‘Hot Stuff’: The Night the Queen of Disco Won Rock’s Crown
By the start of 1979, Donna Summer was the undisputed Queen of Disco, and disco itself was starting to look like a kingdom with no future. Rock radio would not touch it, punk and new wave were circling, and Summer’s producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, had decided her next album would not simply defend…
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How Don McLean Made ‘Empty Chairs’: The Breakup Ballad That Quietly Gave Birth to ‘Killing Me Softly’
It is the quietest famous thing Don McLean ever did. American Pie, released in October 1971, was built around an eight-and-a-half-minute title track that rewrote rock and roll history as allegory, and it contained Vincent, his luminous portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Between those two monuments sat a song of three minutes and twenty-four seconds…
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How Dire Straits Made ‘Romeo and Juliet’: The Breakup, the Resonator and the Girl Who Found Somebody New
William Shakespeare’s lovers were kept apart by their families. Mark Knopfler’s were kept apart by something more modern: fame. “Romeo and Juliet”, the tender centrepiece of Dire Straits’ third album Making Movies, retells the oldest love story in English as a small, sad scene from the music business — a streetwise Romeo, still singing under…
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How Dionne Warwick Made ‘Heartbreaker’: The Hit She Didn’t Like, and Cried All the Way to the Bank
The partnership began with a job interview of sorts. Clive Davis had spent three years rebuilding Warwick at Arista: he had signed her in 1979, paired her with Barry Manilow as producer, and watched the resulting album Dionne go platinum and its signature ballad, “I’ll Never Love This Way Again”, carry her to the Grammy…
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How Dolly Parton Made ‘Coat of Many Colors’: The Rag Coat Her Mother Sewed Into a Signature Song
Dolly Parton has written thousands of songs, and she has never hesitated when asked to name her favorite. It is not the plea of Jolene, or the goodbye that became I Will Always Love You. It is a three-minute song about a winter coat sewn from rags — a coat her mother made because the…
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How Diana Ross Made ‘Chain Reaction’: The Supremes Record the Bee Gees Were Afraid to Play Her
By 1985, the Bee Gees had become the most bankable ghostwriters in pop. Frozen out of American radio by the anti-disco backlash, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb had reinvented themselves as a songwriting and production service for other people’s voices: Barbra Streisand’s Guilty, Dionne Warwick’s Heartbreaker, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream”.…
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How Deep Purple Made ‘Woman from Tokyo’: The Love Song to a Country They Had Never Seen
In July 1972, Deep Purple were installed in a rented villa outside Rome, supposedly to record the follow-up to Machine Head, and by almost every account the sessions were a shambles. The band had been touring almost without pause for two years. They were exhausted, several of them had been ill, and the two men…
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How Dan Fogelberg Made ‘Run for the Roses’: The Two-Day Song That Became the Kentucky Derby’s Anthem
In the spring of 1980, ABC Sports had a problem of tone. The network was preparing its telecast of the 106th Kentucky Derby, and it wanted a song — something that could carry the romance of the race into American living rooms on the night before the gates opened. The call went to Dan Fogelberg,…
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How Dean Martin Made ‘Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’: The Movie Throwaway That Became His Signature Swing
Some signature songs announce themselves. Ain’t That a Kick in the Head crept in. It was written to order for a Las Vegas heist movie, sung by Dean Martin in the film almost as an aside, released as a single that went nowhere in the summer of 1960 — and then simply refused to go…
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How Cyndi Lauper Made ‘I Drove All Night’: The Orbison Song She Drove to the Top Ten First
On paper, it was a mismatch. The song had been written for the most dramatic voice in American pop — Roy Orbison, all opera and heartbreak — and Orbison had already recorded it, two years earlier, in a home studio in California. But Orbison was gone, his version sat unreleased, and when I Drove All…