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How America Made ‘Ventura Highway’: A Flat Tire, a Road Sign, and the Highway That Never Existed
There is no Ventura Highway. There never was. And yet for more than fifty years, drivers have been humming about it — a sunlit road to somewhere freer, conjured up by a twenty-year-old who had spent most of his life nowhere near it. Ventura Highway, released in the autumn of 1972, is America’s most wistful…
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How Leo Sayer Made ‘More Than I Can Say’: The TV Commercial, the Record Shop, and the Song Recorded in a Night
Most comeback hits are planned for months. This one took an afternoon. In 1980, Leo Sayer was in the studio making an album and needed an oldie — one classic cover to anchor the record. He happened to see a television commercial for a greatest-hits collection by Bobby Vee, a name from pop’s distant past.…
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How Black Sabbath Made ‘Paranoid’: The Two-Hour Filler That Became a Metal Anthem
The most famous song Black Sabbath ever recorded was an afterthought. Paranoid — the title track of their second album, their biggest single, the riff every young guitarist learns — was written in a rush in June 1970 to fill a gap on a record that was already effectively finished. The band needed about three…
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How Prince Made ‘Purple Rain’: The Country Song Stevie Nicks Turned Down, and the Night a Club Recording Became an Anthem
Most career-defining songs are built in studios, layer by layer, under controlled conditions. Purple Rain was captured in a nightclub, in one live performance, by a band playing a benefit concert for a dance company — with a nineteen-year-old guitarist making her live debut in the group. Prince then took that club recording, trimmed it,…
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How Shirley Bassey Made ‘Diamonds Are Forever’: The Bond Theme a Producer Tried to Kill
Every great James Bond theme has a fight behind it, but few fights were as undignified — or as entertaining — as the one over Diamonds Are Forever. The song that Shirley Bassey sang over the titles of Sean Connery’s comeback Bond film in 1971 was nearly strangled before release by one of the film’s…
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How Johnny Mathis Made ‘Misty’: The Teenage Promise He Kept in the Studio
Long before he was famous, Johnny Mathis made a promise to a pianist in a San Francisco jazz club, and Misty is the sound of him keeping it. As a teenager, Mathis heard Erroll Garner play a new instrumental tune at the Black Hawk club and was so taken with it that he went up…
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How Aretha Franklin Made ‘Chain of Fools’: The Song Meant for Otis Redding That Became Her Grammy-Winning Warning
It begins with a guitar that sounds like a warning. Before Aretha Franklin sings a single word on Chain of Fools, Joe South’s tremolo guitar ripples out over a slow, circling groove, and a chorus of voices starts chanting the title — chain, chain, chain — like a verdict being read aloud. Then Franklin enters,…
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How Olivia Newton-John Made ‘Physical’: The Song Tina Turner Turned Down That Ended Up Owning a Decade
It is the most wholesome-sounding song about sex ever to dominate a pop chart. When Physical spent ten consecutive weeks at No. 1 in the winter of 1981–82, it completed the most successful reinvention in pop: Olivia Newton-John, the bashful country-pop ingenue of I Honestly Love You, was now the leotard-clad provocateur of the aerobics…
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How Boz Scaggs Made ‘Breakdown Dead Ahead’: The Foster Sessions That Kept the Silk Machine Running
Every great run of records needs a song that proves the magic wasn’t an accident. For Boz Scaggs, Breakdown Dead Ahead was that proof. Silk Degrees had made him a star in 1976 with a band of unknown session kids and a co-writer barely out of his teens. Four years later, the kids were Toto,…
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How Journey Made ‘Faithfully’: The Road Song Written on a Napkin in Thirty Minutes
Every arena band of the early 1980s had a song about the road, but only one of them was written on a paper napkin, in the back of a tour bus, by a keyboard player watching the moon slide through grey clouds and wondering whether his marriage would survive the tour. Faithfully became Journey’s defining…