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How Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Made ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’: The Indiana Girl Who Became Rock’s Most Mysterious Goodbye
There is a special kind of confidence in burying a brand-new classic inside a greatest-hits album. In November 1993, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released Greatest Hits, a career summary that stretched from Breakdown to Free Fallin’ — and tucked into it was a song that would out-chart almost everything around it. Mary Jane’s Last…
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How Don McLean Made ‘And I Love You So’: The B-Side That Became a Standard
Don McLean will always be introduced the same way: the man who wrote American Pie. But ask singers rather than fans, and a different title keeps coming up. And I Love You So, a quiet love ballad from his debut album, may be the most recorded song he ever wrote. Perry Como took it into…
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How Dusty Springfield Made ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Italian Song She Refused to Let Go
Some of the biggest hits in pop begin as accidents of travel. In January 1965, Dusty Springfield went to Italy to sing at the Sanremo Festival, the great annual showcase of Italian song, and heard a soaring ballad performed by its composer, Pino Donaggio, and by the American singer Jody Miller. The song was Io…
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How Van Morrison Made ‘Brown Eyed Girl’: The Signature Song He Signed Away
It is one of the most played songs of the twentieth century — three minutes of summer nostalgia that have soundtracked weddings, films, and ten million American radio broadcasts. It made Van Morrison a solo star. And by Morrison’s own account, he never received a single royalty for writing or recording it, because he had…
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How Duran Duran Made ‘Ordinary World’: The Grief Song That Rescued a Band the World Had Written Off
By the end of 1992, Duran Duran were supposed to be over. The defining pin-ups of the MTV decade had watched the eighties end and take their audience with it; their previous album had flopped, grunge owned the radio, and the band that remained was a trio playing to a fraction of its former crowd.…
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How Tina Turner Made ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’: The School Choir That Carried a Thunderdome Anthem Around the World
In the summer of 1985, barely a year after Private Dancer had completed the most celebrated comeback in pop history, Tina Turner did something no one expected from a singer in her mid-forties: she went to Australia and played the villain. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third of George Miller’s post-apocalyptic road films, Turner…
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How U2 Made ‘One’: The Song That Saved the Band
In the autumn of 1990, the biggest band in the world went to Berlin to reinvent itself, and very nearly ended instead. U2 arrived in the reunifying city expecting inspiration and found a cold studio, a pile of half-finished demos, and an argument about what they should even sound like. The song that rescued them…
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How Dolly Parton Made ‘Jolene’: A Bank Teller, a Little Girl, and the Most Famous Plea in Country Music
It lasts barely two and a half minutes. It contains only about 200 words, and a remarkable share of them are the same word repeated. Yet Jolene, released in the autumn of 1973, became the song Dolly Parton would be asked about more than any other — a plea sung to a beautiful rival, begging…
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How Tom Jones Made ‘Delilah’: The Murder Ballad That Became a Stadium Anthem
It is, when you stop and listen to the words, an astonishing thing to sing along to. A man watches through a window as the woman he loves makes love to another man. He waits in the street until morning. When the lover leaves, he knocks at her door; she laughs in his face; and…
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How The Rolling Stones Made ‘Paint It Black’: The Studio Joke That Became Rock’s Darkest Number One
It starts like a door slamming in a faraway country: a sitar line coiling in circles, drums galloping underneath, a bass growling up from somewhere below the floor, and Mick Jagger singing about a red door he wants painted black. “Paint It Black” is three minutes and forty-six seconds of pure dread — a song…