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How Bruce Springsteen Made ‘Hungry Heart’: The Song He Almost Gave to the Ramones
It opens with a confession most hit singles would bury: a man with a wife and kids in Baltimore goes out for a ride and never comes back. Then the band kicks in, a piano starts bouncing, and Bruce Springsteen delivers the bleakest singalong of his career as if it were a summer postcard. Hungry…
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How Carly Simon Made ‘Anticipation’: The Hit She Wrote in Fifteen Minutes While Cat Stevens Kept Her Waiting
Some songs take years of rewrites. Anticipation took about as long as a pot of coffee. One evening in 1971, Carly Simon was pacing her small apartment on West 35th Street in New York, growing more nervous by the minute. Cat Stevens — the British singer-songwriter whose records she adored, and for whom she had…
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How Brenda Lee Made ‘Sweet Nothin’s’: The Whisper That Gave a 14-Year-Old Her First Top 10 Hit
The record begins with a whisper. Before a single note is sung, a man’s voice murmurs something unintelligible into the microphone — sweet nothings, literally — and a teenage girl answers him with a delighted, grown-up purr: “Uh-huh, honey.” Then the band kicks in, the saxophone honks, and Brenda Lee launches into two minutes and…
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How Boston Made ‘Don’t Look Back’: The Last Song Finished, the First One the World Heard
Every band dreads the second album, but Boston’s dread was industrial in scale. Their 1976 debut had become one of the best-selling first albums in history, and Epic Records wanted the follow-up fast — while the band’s leader, Tom Scholz, was constitutionally incapable of doing anything fast. The song that resolved the stand-off was the…
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How Boz Scaggs Made ‘We’re All Alone’: The B-Side Ballad That Became a Standard
It is the quietest kind of success story in pop: a songwriter places his most tender ballad at the very end of his breakthrough album, never releases it as a single in his own country, and watches it become a standard anyway — carried there by other voices. We’re All Alone, the closing track of…
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How Bonnie Tyler Made ‘It’s a Heartache’: The Husky Voice Nobody Planned
Most singers spend their careers protecting their voices. Bonnie Tyler’s career was created by damaging hers. In 1977 the young Welsh singer went into hospital with nodules on her vocal cords and came out, after surgery and a recovery she cheerfully failed to take seriously, with a rasp that no producer could have designed and…
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How Bon Jovi Made ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’: The Bonnie Tyler Chorus That Became Their First Number One
In the summer of 1986, Bon Jovi were the hardest-working support band in America: two albums into their career, respected on the road and still waiting for a hit of their own. Their first number one, when it arrived that November, was not really new at all. Its chorus had already been recorded — by…
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How Bobby Darin Made ‘Splish Splash’: The Twelve-Minute Bet That Saved His Career
Some hit records are planned for months. Splish Splash was a bet, settled at a piano in what Darin liked to say was about twelve minutes. In the spring of 1958 Bobby Darin was twenty-one and running out of chances. He had already been signed and dropped once, and his new label was losing patience.…
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How Blondie Made ‘Atomic’: The Spaghetti-Western Disco Song That Was “Lying There Like a Lox”
Some hit songs are written to order. Atomic was written to a challenge: could Blondie do the trick of Heart of Glass — the disco record made by a punk band that had topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in early 1979 — a second time? Keyboard player Jimmy Destri set out…
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How Bob Seger Made ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’: The Demo He Rewrote, Never Signed, and Nearly Left Off the Album
Just before midnight in a Sheffield, Alabama studio, the most famous Bob Seger record of all was already finished — and Bob Seger was not singing on it. Old Time Rock and Roll began as somebody else’s demo, sung by one of its own writers during downtime at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Seger heard it…