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How Anne Murray Made ‘Danny’s Song’: The Letter From a Brother That Brought Her Back
Some hit songs are written for the charts. Danny’s Song was written for a brother — a broke, brand-new father who had nothing to give his baby son, and whose younger brother decided that a song would have to do instead. Kenny Loggins wrote it while he was still in high school. He then recorded…
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How Anita Baker Made ‘Caught Up in the Rapture’: The Song That Carried the Album’s Name
Every hit creates a problem for the song that follows it, and in the autumn of 1986 Anita Baker had a beautiful problem. Sweet Love had turned her album Rapture into the slow-burning phenomenon of the year, and now Elektra needed a second single to prove it had not been a fluke. The label did…
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How Bob Marley & The Wailers Made ‘Three Little Birds’: The Windowsill Song Written After the Gunmen Came
The most reassuring song ever put on record — a song so gentle that it is played in hospitals, kindergartens and football stadiums, a song whose entire message is that every little thing is gonna be all right — was written by a man who had recently been shot in his own kitchen. In December…
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How Andy Williams Made ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’: The Song He Nearly Turned Down
In the spring of 1963, the smoothest voice in America sang a song about a man who could not get over a woman, and America could not get over the song. Can’t Get Used to Losing You lasts barely two minutes and twenty seconds, yet it held the No. 2 spot on the Billboard Hot…
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How Aretha Franklin Made ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)’: One Day in Muscle Shoals That Ended in a Brawl
On the morning of 24 January 1967, a twenty-four-year-old singer with nine failed albums behind her walked into a small studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, sat down at a piano, and started to sing. By the end of that single day, Aretha Franklin had recorded the song that would turn her into the Queen of…
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How Aerosmith Made ‘Love in an Elevator’: The Song That Started When the Doors Opened
Most hit songs begin with a melody or a title. Aerosmith’s first single of the Pump era began with embarrassment — Steven Tyler, a hotel elevator, a beautiful woman, and a set of doors that opened at exactly the wrong moment. By 1989 the band were two years into the most improbable second act in…
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How America Made ‘Lonely People’: The Newlywed’s Answer to ‘Eleanor Rigby’
Most answer songs pick a fight. Lonely People starts one gently and then refuses to finish it. In 1966 the Beatles had asked, twice over, where all the lonely people come from and where they all belong, and had left the question hanging in the air of Eleanor Rigby. Eight years later, a newly married…
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How Al Green Made ‘Love and Happiness’: Five Taps on a Coca-Cola Crate and the Groove Willie Mitchell Had to Stop
It begins with almost nothing. A soft croon, barely a breath of melody, and then five dry taps — a man’s foot coming down on an old Coca-Cola crate on the floor of a Memphis studio. Only after those five taps does the guitar arrive, one of the most imitated licks in soul music, and…
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How AC/DC Made ‘Thunderstruck’: The Little Guitar Trick That Shook the World
In 1990, AC/DC badly needed a comeback. The Australian band that had opened the decade with Back in Black had spent the late eighties sliding down the bill, and their recent albums had sold on loyalty rather than excitement. So they flew to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, hired Bruce Fairbairn — the producer…
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How Air Supply Made ‘Making Love Out of Nothing at All’: The Ballad Blocked by Its Own Songwriter
By 1983, Air Supply were the undisputed kings of the soft-rock ballad — two Australians and a string of featherweight hits about love, loss and longing. But the biggest record of their career was not written by Graham Russell, the duo’s own songwriter. It arrived almost by accident, courtesy of the least featherweight figure in…