-
How Elvis Presley Made ‘Heartbreak Hotel’: The Morbid Mess That Became His First Number One
In November 1955, Elvis Presley was a twenty-year-old truck driver’s son with a handful of strange, electrifying records on a tiny Memphis label, and RCA Victor was about to pay $35,000 to buy his contract — an unheard-of sum for an unproven singer. Everything about the gamble depended on the first session for his new…
-
How Whitney Houston Made ‘Greatest Love of All’: The B-Side Anthem Written by a Woman Saying Goodbye
It was the song that convinced a famous producer to believe in her, the song her label boss initially didn’t want on her album, and the song her record company first threw away on the back of another single. It was also written, nine years earlier, by a young lyricist who had just undergone a…
-
How Elton John Made ‘Your Song’: The Breakfast-Table Ballad a Rival Band Gave Back
Almost every great love song pretends to experience. Your Song is the opposite: it is a love song written by a seventeen-year-old who had never been in love, set to music in about twenty minutes by a twenty-two-year-old who was still living in his mother’s flat, and first recorded by somebody else entirely. It should…
-
How Van Halen Made ‘Panama’: The Car Song David Lee Roth Wrote to Prove a Critic Wrong
A reporter once accused David Lee Roth of singing about only three things: women, partying, and fast cars. Roth, who rarely let an insult pass without an answer, did something nobody expected — he checked the charge against his own catalogue. Women? Certainly. Partying? Guilty, happily. But fast cars, he realized, he had never actually…
-
How Ella Fitzgerald Made ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’: The Nursery Rhyme She Nagged Into a Number One
In the spring of 1938, Ella Fitzgerald was twenty-one years old, the girl singer with Chick Webb’s orchestra, and in possession of an idea that most professionals would have laughed out of the band bus. She wanted to take a children’s nursery rhyme — a playground chant about a dropped basket that went back to…
-
How Earth, Wind & Fire Made ‘After the Love Has Gone’: The Ballad Born From a Forgotten Lyric
Earth, Wind & Fire built their empire on uplift — horns blazing, voices soaring, songs about dancing through September nights and shining like stars. So it is one of the lovely ironies of their career that the most heartbroken record they ever made, the slow and aching After the Love Has Gone, was not written…
-
How Waylon Jennings Made ‘Luckenbach, Texas’: The Biggest Hit He Ever Hated
It spent six weeks at number one, was named the biggest country song of 1977, and carried its album to a piece of history. It is also a song Waylon Jennings flat-out disliked — about a town he had never visited, written by two men who had never visited it either, celebrating an escape to…
-
How Eagles Made ‘One of These Nights’: The Disco-Tinged Gamble That Took Them to Number One
Every great band has a hinge record — the one where the door swings from who they were to who they would become. For the Eagles, that record is One of These Nights. In the spring of 1975 the band were country-rock royalty: beloved, harmonious, and in serious danger of being typecast as the mellow…
-
How Toto Made ‘Rosanna’: The Borrowed Groove That Won Record of the Year
The biggest album of Toto’s career does not begin with a voice, a guitar, or a keyboard. It begins with a drum kit, entirely alone, playing a lopsided, ghost-noted shuffle that drummers have been trying to copy ever since. Two bars of drums — then the horns, the keyboards, and the voices pile in, and…
-
How Donna Summer Made ‘Last Dance’: The Bathroom Pitch, the One-Day Session, and the Night Disco Won an Oscar
It begins as a ballad — a slow, pleading torch song, a woman asking for one final romance before the night is over. Then the beat drops, the strings surge, and it turns into one of the most euphoric dance records ever made. Last Dance, recorded for the 1978 film Thank God It’s Friday, did…