-
How Smokey Robinson Made ‘The Tears of a Clown’: The Album Cut That Waited Three Years to Top Two Charts
It began as a present nobody knew what to do with. In 1966, a sixteen-year-old Stevie Wonder turned up at the Motown Christmas party carrying an instrumental track he had built with producer Hank Cosby — a bouncing, calliope-topped groove that he could not find words for. He handed it to Smokey Robinson, the label’s…
-
How Rod Stewart Made ‘Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)’: The Banned Seduction That Ruled America for Eight Weeks
It is the quietest big record Rod Stewart ever made — a seduction conducted at the volume of a whisper, over a groove so unhurried it seems to be holding its breath. Yet in the winter of 1976–77, Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright) was the loudest fact in American pop music. It sat at…
-
How Chaka Khan Made ‘I Feel for You’: The Prince Song, the Happy Accident, and the Hit That Relaunched a Queen
The most famous introduction in eighties pop is a stutter: a voice chopping a singer’s name into pieces — Chaka, Chaka, Chaka Khan — before the record has even properly begun. It sounds like a stroke of genius. It was, in fact, a mistake in the editing room that producer Arif Mardin heard, loved and…
-
How Patti LaBelle Made ‘On My Own’: The Number-One Duet She Recorded With a Man She Had Never Met
In the summer of 1986, the number one song in America was a duet about the end of a love affair — two voices taking turns through the wreckage of a relationship, each one agreeing, gently and without bitterness, to go on alone. What nobody listening could have guessed was how literally the record had…
-
How Sam Cooke Made ‘You Send Me’: The Gospel Gamble Hidden on a B-Side
In the autumn of 1957, American radio performed a small act of rebellion. A brand-new record label issued its first single, a Sam Cooke record with the Gershwin standard Summertime on the side the label wanted played. Disc jockeys across the country took one listen, turned the disc over, and played the other side instead.…
-
How Johnny Cash Made ‘I Walk the Line’: A Twenty-Minute Vow, a Backward Tape, and a Paper Snare Drum
Some signature songs are built over years. I Walk the Line was written, by Johnny Cash’s own account, in about twenty minutes, backstage at a show in Texas, by a twenty-four-year-old singer who had been famous for barely a year and married for barely longer. It was a promise set to music — a young…
-
How Led Zeppelin Made ‘Black Dog’: The Labrador, the Train Ticket Riff, and the Song You Cannot Dance To
It is named after a dog. Not a hellhound, not a blues demon, not a symbol of depression — an elderly black Labrador that used to wander the grounds of a Hampshire country house, disappear into the night, and come home at dawn too exhausted to do anything but sleep. The dog had nothing whatsoever…
-
How Marvin Gaye Made ‘Let’s Get It On’: The Rehab Prayer That Became Soul’s Greatest Seduction
The most famous invitation in soul music began as a prayer of thanksgiving. When Ed Townsend first sketched out Let’s Get It On, he had just come out of a rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, and the song he heard in his head was a religious one — a man urging himself to get on with…
-
How Boston Made ‘Amanda’: The Ballad That Waited Six Years, Leaked Early, and Topped the Charts Without a Video
By the time Amanda reached number one in November 1986, the song was already six years old, had been heard by millions of radio listeners in bootleg form, and belonged to a band that had not released a single in the best part of a decade. It had no music video. Its singer was a…
-
How Cat Stevens Made ‘Wild World’: The Parting Song He Gave Away Before He Sang It
It is one of the gentlest break-up songs ever written, and one of the most argued over. Wild World sounds like a lullaby and lands like a warning: a young man watches someone he loves walk out into a world he insists is full of danger, and hopes, against the evidence of the lyric itself,…