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How Christopher Cross Made ‘Never Be the Same’: The Breakup Ballad That Became an Adult Contemporary Number One
Christopher Cross built his legend on a song about escape. Sailing drifts away from trouble on a canvas wing, and it carried its singer — a soft-spoken Texan almost nobody had heard of at the start of 1980 — all the way to No. 1. But the third single from his debut album sails nowhere.…
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How The Cars Made ‘You Might Think’: The Computer-Graphics Gamble That Beat ‘Thriller’
In February 1984, the Cars released a three-minute single that sounded like a cartoon of a love song — bright, twitchy, and impossibly catchy — and then spent a small fortune turning it into one of the first music videos built with computer graphics. By the end of the year, You Might Think had gone…
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How Cher Made ‘Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves’: The Comeback Hit Whose Original Title Had to Be Buried
It is built like a fairground ride and it lands like a short story. In the autumn of 1971, the biggest record in America was a two-minute-and-thirty-six-second story song about a teenage girl in a traveling show, narrated from inside the wagon, whose chorus was an insult — the jeer that respectable townsfolk threw at…
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How Supertramp Made ‘Give a Little Bit’: The Teenage Song Roger Hodgson Kept in a Drawer for Six Years
The most generous song Supertramp ever recorded began as a private homework assignment from a teenager who had just heard the Beatles sing All You Need Is Love on a global television broadcast and decided he wanted to write something that simple, that direct, and that true. Roger Hodgson was nineteen or twenty years old,…
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How Styx Made ‘Renegade’: The Piano Dirge That Became a Stadium Anthem
It has the most famous cold open in arena rock: voices alone in the dark — “Oh mama, I’m in fear for my life from the long arm of the law” — and then the whole band crashes in like a door kicked off its hinges. Yet Renegade, the Tommy Shaw song that has closed…
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How Chicago Made ‘25 or 6 to 4’: The 3 A.M. Song About Writing a Song
It is one of the most argued-over titles in rock history. When Chicago released 25 or 6 to 4 in 1970, listeners decoded it as a drug quantity, a secret formula, a cricket score, a name in code. Radio programmers suspected the worst, fans suspected the best, and everybody suspected something. The truth, when songwriter…
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How Stevie Wonder Made ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’: The Hit His Mother Helped Name
When Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours hit the shops in June 1970, Stevie Wonder had just turned twenty. He had been a professional musician for nine years — a third of his life spent as “Little Stevie,” the harmonica-playing prodigy inside Berry Gordy’s hit machine, singing other people’s songs under other people’s supervision. This record…
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How Carly Simon Made ‘Nobody Does It Better’: The Bond Theme She Didn’t Write That Outlasted Her Own Songs
Here is the strangest line on Carly Simon’s résumé: the biggest, longest-running hit of her career is a song she did not write. Nobody Does It Better, the theme to the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, spent longer on the charts than You’re So Vain, longer than Anticipation, longer than anything…
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How Steely Dan Made ‘Peg’: Seven Guitarists Failed the Solo, Then Jay Graydon Walked In
There is a moment, about halfway through Peg, when a guitar rears up out of the slickest groove Steely Dan ever built and snarls for all of twenty-four bars. It is one of the most celebrated solos in rock. It is also about the eighth attempt. To finish the poppiest song on Aja — the…
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How Chic Made ‘Le Freak’: The Night Studio 54 Slammed the Door
Every great dance record is an invitation, but the greatest disco record of all began as an insult thrown back at a closed door. On New Year’s Eve 1977, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards — the guitarist and bassist behind Chic, owners of one of the biggest club hits in America that winter — stood…