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How Linda Ronstadt Made ‘You’re No Good’: The Show Closer She Nearly Threw Away
In the summer of 1974, Linda Ronstadt owed Capitol Records one last album. She had already signed with David Geffen’s Asylum label, and by every industry rule the Capitol obligation should have been a throwaway. Instead, she and producer Peter Asher spent three months crafting Heart Like a Wheel as if her whole career depended…
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How Otis Redding Made ‘Try a Little Tenderness’: The Tea-Room Standard He Turned Into a Soul Detonation
It starts like a lullaby and ends like a building coming down. For the first two minutes of Try a Little Tenderness, Otis Redding does something almost no one expected of the shouting soul man from Macon: he whispers, he pleads, he croons a song older than he was. Then the horns begin to lean…
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How Phil Collins Made ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)’: The Discarded Ballad That Became His First Number One
On Oscar night in 1985, Phil Collins sat in the audience in a tuxedo and watched somebody else perform his song. Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) was nominated for Best Original Song, but Collins had not been invited to sing it. Instead, Broadway dancer Ann Reinking mostly lip-synced it while performing…
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How Andy Williams Made ‘(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story’: The Rejected Lyric That Became a Classic
Everybody who lived through the winter of 1970–71 remembers the melody: a slow, aching piano theme that seemed to be playing everywhere at once — in cinemas, in department stores, leaking out of every radio in America. It came from Love Story, the film that made the whole country cry, and as a piece of…
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How Barbra Streisand Made ‘People’: The Thirty-Minute Song Broadway Almost Threw Away
Every singer has a signature song, but few signatures were written as fast — or survived as close a call — as People. The opening line, about people who need people being the luckiest people in the world, became so completely identified with Barbra Streisand that it is easy to forget how accidental its existence…
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How Michael Jackson Made ‘Beat It’: The Guitar Solo Eddie Van Halen Refused to Charge For
Quincy Jones had a problem only Michael Jackson could solve. Making Thriller in 1982, the producer wanted one thing the album did not yet have: a rock song, something with the lean, street-corner swagger of the Knack’s My Sharona. So he asked his singer — the biggest R&B and pop star on the planet, a…
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How Queen Made ‘Another One Bites the Dust’: John Deacon’s Bass Line, Michael Jackson’s Advice, and the Song Queen Nearly Kept as an Album Track
Queen were the least likely disco act in Britain: a band built on stacked harmonies, operatic structures, and Brian May’s choir of overdubbed guitars, famous for printing “no synthesizers” on their album sleeves. Yet their biggest-selling single in America — the record that took them to audiences rock radio had never delivered — is essentially…
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How Jackson Browne Made ‘Running on Empty’: The Hit Recorded on Stage, Not in a Studio
Most live albums are souvenirs — familiar songs taped in concert to squeeze one more product out of a tour. Jackson Browne had a stranger idea. In 1977 he took a tape machine on the road and recorded an entire album of brand-new songs about life on tour, capturing them wherever the life actually happened:…
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How Anita Baker Made ‘Sweet Love’: The Chapter 8 Reunion That Crowned the Queen of Quiet Storm
In the summer of 1986, American radio was loud. Synthesizers barked, drum machines marched, and pop stars competed to sound bigger than the last. Into that noise came a record that did the opposite of everything: a slow, unhurried love song, sung by a contralto so low and warm it seemed to slow the listener’s…
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How Lionel Richie Made ‘Say You, Say Me’: The Oscar Winner That Wasn’t on the Soundtrack
In the autumn of 1985, Lionel Richie was arguably the most bankable songwriter alive. Can’t Slow Down had won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating Purple Rain and Born in the U.S.A.; he had co-written We Are the World and sung its opening line; and every film producer in Hollywood wanted his name…