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How Dean Martin Made ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’: The Filler Song That Knocked the Beatles off No. 1
In the summer of 1964, the most powerful force in popular music was four young men from Liverpool, and the least likely challenger imaginable was a forty-seven-year-old crooner who had not had a Top 40 hit since 1958 and openly could not stand rock and roll. Dean Martin’s weapon was a song he had already…
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How The Doobie Brothers Made ‘China Grove’: The Town Tom Johnston Invented — Then Discovered Was Real
It opens with one of the most imitated guitar riffs in rock — the Billboard staff would later call it “the stuff of air guitar legend” — and then it drops you in a sleepy Texas town where the sheriff is sharp, the strangers carry samurai swords, and everybody seems to be watching everybody else.…
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How Dan Fogelberg Made ‘Part of the Plan’: The Wish List, the Eagle, and a Solo He Played Himself
Dan Fogelberg’s career nearly ended before it began. His first album, Home Free, released in 1972, was a lovely, meticulously crafted record that almost nobody bought, and the young singer from Peoria, Illinois, found himself in the classic second-album trap: one more chance, no momentum, and a label wondering why it had bothered. What saved…
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How The Carpenters Made ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’: The Song That Waited Seven Years for the Voice of Karen Carpenter
For four weeks in the summer of 1970, the biggest record in America was a whisper. (They Long to Be) Close to You had no shouting, no protest, no psychedelic sprawl — just a piano, a flugelhorn, and a twenty-year-old woman wondering why birds suddenly appear every time her love is near. It sounded like…
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How The Beach Boys Made ‘Don’t Worry Baby’: The Answer to ‘Be My Baby’ That Phil Spector Turned Down
In the summer of 1963, Brian Wilson was driving when the Ronettes’ Be My Baby came over the radio, and the chorus struck him so hard that he pulled the car over to the side of the road to take it apart in his head. He was twenty-one, already the leader of the Beach Boys,…
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How Commodores Made ‘Sail On’: The Country-Tinged Breakup Song That Pointed Lionel Richie Toward Nashville
In the summer of 1979, the Commodores were the surest thing on Motown: a funk band from Alabama that could fill a dance floor with “Brick House” and then empty a room’s defenses with “Three Times a Lady.” So the first single from their seventh album, Midnight Magic, should have been a statement of intent.…
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How Cyndi Lauper Made ‘True Colors’: The Gospel Ballad She Stripped Down to a Whisper
The strangest thing about True Colors is that Cyndi Lauper did not write it. This was the singer who had co-written almost everything on her debut, who guarded her material fiercely and treated other people’s songs — even Prince’s and Jules Shear’s — as raw clay to be torn apart and rebuilt in her own…
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How Talking Heads Made ‘And She Was’: The Girl Who Floated Over the Yoo-hoo Factory
It may be the most joyful three and a half minutes Talking Heads ever recorded: a bright, bouncing pop song about a young woman who rises up from her backyard, floats over the houses and highways of her neighbourhood, and drifts away into the sky while the man who loves her watches from below. It…
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How Connie Francis Made ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’: The Song She Hated That Saved Her Career
It was the last song of the last session of a failing career, recorded in the final minutes of studio time by a teenager who despised it, and it had to be dragged out of her by her father’s shouting. Connie Francis did not want to sing Who’s Sorry Now? She thought it was corny,…
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How The Clash Made ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’: The Jeans Commercial That Gave Punk Its Only Number One
It is the simplest question in rock and roll, asked over three chords and a shout in Spanish: should I stay or should I go? When the Clash released the song in 1982, it was a modest hit, the flip half of a double A-side. Nine years later, thanks to a television commercial for blue…