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How Bob Seger Made ‘Night Moves’: Six Months of Writing, One Long Night in Toronto
By 1976, Bob Seger had been a professional musician for more than a decade, a giant in his native Michigan and a rumour almost everywhere else. He had the voice, the band and the work ethic; what he did not have was the song that would carry him across America. He found it by looking…
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How Ray Charles Made ‘What’d I Say’: The Hit He Invented on Stage Because He Ran Out of Songs
Most classic songs begin with a writer sitting down to write. What’d I Say began because Ray Charles had nothing left to play. Late one night in December 1958, working a dance date in Pennsylvania, Charles and his orchestra had run through every arrangement they knew — and the contract still had about twelve minutes…
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How ABBA Made ‘Mamma Mia’: The Song They Tried to Give Away
It is hard to imagine now, but the song that would one day give its name to a stage musical, two blockbuster films, and an entire pop-cultural empire was once a song ABBA did not quite want. In the spring of 1975, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus thought so little of Mamma Mia that they…
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How Kool & the Gang Made ‘Cherish’: The Wedding Song Written on a Bahamas Beach
For two decades, Kool & the Gang were the band you hired when you wanted a room to move. They had soundtracked the seventies with Jungle Boogie and Hollywood Swinging, then reinvented themselves for the eighties with Ladies’ Night and the unstoppable Celebration. Nobody — least of all the band — expected their biggest ballad…
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How Bette Midler Made ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’: The Hit She Nearly Refused
Every generation gets one song that becomes the official music of gratitude — played at graduations, retirements, weddings, and funerals, dedicated to the quiet people who hold up the loud ones. For the last thirty-five years, that song has been Wind Beneath My Wings, and it belongs, immovably, to Bette Midler. Yet the song was…
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How Neil Diamond Made ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’: The Bottle of Wine That Became His First Number One
For more than half a century, listeners have pictured her the same way: a free-spirited woman with a smile that could rescue a lonely Saturday night. But Cracklin’ Rosie was never a woman at all. She was a bottle — a cheap, lightly sparkling rosé wine that lonely men on a Canadian reservation bought at…
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How Bon Jovi Made ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’: The Seger-Inspired Cowboy Ballad That Became the Band’s Anthem
In 1987, Bon Jovi were the loudest success story in rock: a New Jersey bar band whose third album, Slippery When Wet, was selling in the millions behind two No. 1 singles. Yet the record that may define them longest is the quiet one — a weather-beaten power ballad built on acoustic guitar, in which…
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How James Brown Made ‘Cold Sweat’: The One-Chord Groove That Invented Funk
One of the most important records of the twentieth century began as a grunt. After a show one night in 1967, somewhere on the endless American road, James Brown called his bandleader into the dressing room and grunted a bass line at him — a rhythmic, circling figure with no melody attached, just feel. The…
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How Anne Murray Made ‘You Needed Me’: The Ballad With No Chorus That Saved a Career
By 1977, Anne Murray had every reason to wonder whether her moment had passed. The Canadian singer who had broken through at the start of the decade with Snowbird and charmed American audiences with Danny’s Song had gone several years without a major pop hit in the United States. Her last Top 40 single there…
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How Louis Armstrong Made ‘Hello, Dolly!’: The Demo That Dethroned the Beatles
On December 3, 1963, Louis Armstrong walked into a New York recording studio for the first time in about two years. He was sixty-two years old, the most beloved entertainer jazz had ever produced, and he had come to do somebody a favour. His manager, Joe Glaser, had connections to a new Broadway musical that…