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How Black Sabbath Made ‘Changes’: The Piano Ballad Written for a Drummer’s Broken Marriage
The strangest sound on Black Sabbath’s fourth album is not a riff. It is a piano, played slowly and simply, with no electric guitar and no drums anywhere near it. Changes, the third track on Vol. 4, released in September 1972, is a plain, grieving ballad sung by Ozzy Osbourne in the most exposed voice…
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How Bob Dylan Made ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: The Ten-Minute Song That Asked America Nine Questions
In April 1962, Bob Dylan was twenty years old, nearly broke, and by the cold arithmetic of the record business, a failure. His first album, released the month before, had sold so poorly that people inside Columbia Records had taken to calling him “Hammond’s folly,” after John Hammond, the legendary producer who had signed him.…
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How Billy Ocean Made ‘Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car’: The Borrowed Line That Drove His Final Number One
Some hit songs arrive as confessions, and some arrive as commands. Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car is pure command — eight words of cheerful impatience that Billy Ocean delivers like a man who has waited long enough. Released in January 1988, it became the third and final American number one of his…
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How Billy Joel Made ‘New York State of Mind’: The Greyhound Ride Home That Became an Anthem
Billy Joel never released New York State of Mind as a single. It charted for nobody, it was promoted by nobody, and the album it came from barely troubled the charts at all. Yet it became the song New York claims as its own — the one played when the city is celebrating, and, more…
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How Bee Gees Made ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’: The One-Hour Song That Healed the Brothers First
The first thing How Can You Mend a Broken Heart ever mended was the Bee Gees themselves. When Barry and Robin Gibb wrote it in August 1970, the group had effectively ceased to exist: the brothers had split in acrimony the year before, Robin had gone solo, and the most successful British harmony act of…
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How Billie Holiday Made ‘Fine and Mellow’: Her Own Blues, and a Last Duet With Prez
On the afternoon of December 8, 1957, American television showed something it had never quite shown before: Billie Holiday, seated among a circle of ageing swing masters in a CBS studio in New York, singing a blues she had written herself nearly twenty years earlier. The programme was The Sound of Jazz, and the song…
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How Barry White Made ‘I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby’: The Demo That Forced the Producer to Become the Star
Before 1973, Barry White’s plan was to stay invisible. He was a Los Angeles songwriter, producer and arranger who built records for other people and was genuinely uncomfortable with the sound of his own voice — that vast, velvet baritone the world would soon treat as an aphrodisiac. Then he sang three demos at a…
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How Bette Midler Made ‘The Rose’: The 45-Minute Song That Beat 3,000 Others
Amanda McBroom was not trying to write a standard. She was a Los Angeles singer-songwriter and actress whose manager had given her some practical career advice: if she wanted a record deal, she should write some Bob Seger-type tunes — gritty, commercial, rocking. McBroom went away and, in roughly forty-five minutes, produced the opposite of…
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How Barry Manilow Made ‘Can’t Smile Without You’: The Song Three Songwriters Couldn’t Give Away
It opens with a whistle — a soft, unhurried whistle, the sound of a man strolling down a street with somebody on his mind — and then Barry Manilow leans into one of the simplest confessions in pop: he can’t smile, can’t laugh, can’t sing, can’t do anything at all without her. Can’t Smile Without…
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How Barbra Streisand Made ‘Evergreen’: The Melody She Wrote on a Guitar She Was Still Learning to Play
Barbra Streisand was not a songwriter. In 1976 she was the biggest female star in American entertainment — a singer who interpreted other people’s songs better than anyone alive, an Oscar-winning actress, a perfectionist who controlled every inch of her records and films — but the melodies on her albums came from professional composers. Then,…