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How Pat Benatar Made ‘Love Is a Battlefield’: The Slow Ballad Her Husband Refused to Leave Alone
By the summer of 1983, Pat Benatar had nothing left to prove. Four albums in four years had produced Heartbreaker, Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Promises in the Dark and Shadows of the Night, and her voice — a mezzo-soprano trained for opera and then aimed like a weapon at rock and roll —…
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How Pink Floyd Made ‘Echoes’: The Happy Accidents That Filled an Entire Album Side
It begins with a single piano note, ringing out like sonar through deep water. Then it happens again. And again. From that one strange, submarine “ping,” Pink Floyd built a piece of music twenty-three and a half minutes long — so long it took up the entire second side of their 1971 album Meddle, and…
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How AC/DC Made ‘Back in Black’: The Eulogy That Refused to Mourn
On February 19, 1980, Bon Scott — the leering, laughing, irreplaceable voice of AC/DC — was found dead in a car in London, aged 33, after a night of heavy drinking. The band had just broken America with Highway to Hell. By every rule of rock history, this was the moment the story ended: a…
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How Kansas Made ‘Point of Know Return’: The Warm-Up Riff That Became a Classic
Some classic songs are laboured over for months. Point of Know Return began as a warm-up exercise — a keyboard riff Steve Walsh played to loosen his fingers before sessions, never intended for an album at all. It ended up as the title track of the biggest album of Kansas’s career, a top-thirty single, and…
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How Luther Vandross Made ‘Never Too Much’: The Demo He Bankrolled Himself That Launched the Velvet Voice
For nearly a decade, Luther Vandross was the most famous anonymous voice in American music. If you listened to the radio in the late 1970s, you heard him constantly — you just didn’t know his name. He was the background singer stars begged for, the jingle voice selling Kentucky Fried Chicken and Juicy Fruit, the…
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How Bobby Darin Made ‘Dream Lover’: The Song He Wrote at the Piano and Stretched Into a Standard
Bobby Darin did not find Dream Lover. He built it, at a piano, out of a handful of chord changes he could not stop playing — and then, in the studio, he did the thing that separated him from every other teen idol of 1959: he made it bigger. Strings, voices, a swaying, sophisticated arrangement…
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How Brenda Lee Made ‘I’m Sorry’: The B-Side Her Label Was Afraid to Release
On March 28, 1960, a fifteen-year-old singer walked into Bradley Studios in Nashville to record a song her own record company did not believe she was old enough to sing. Brenda Lee stood barely four feet nine inches tall, and America knew her as Little Miss Dynamite — a pint-sized belter of rockabilly rave-ups who…
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How James Taylor Made ‘Sweet Baby James’: The Cowboy Lullaby Written Behind the Wheel
Ask a room of James Taylor fans what Sweet Baby James is about, and most will describe a self-portrait: the young cowboy alone on the range, the singer singing himself to sleep. It is a reasonable guess. It is also wrong. The most beloved song James Taylor ever wrote is a lullaby for a baby…
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How Kenny Loggins Made ‘Footloose’: The Dance Anthem Two Injured Men Wrote in a Hotel Room
The most joyful dance song of the 1980s was written by two men who could barely move. One had cracked his ribs falling off a stage. The other was hiding a raging throat infection and praying his writing partner would not notice. Between them, dosed on painkillers and pride, Kenny Loggins and Dean Pitchford spent…
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How Barry White Made ‘It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me’: The Hit He Didn’t Write That Put Him Back on Top
Barry White was the most self-contained hitmaker in soul music. He wrote his songs, produced his records, arranged the strings, conducted the orchestra, and then stepped to the microphone to rumble over the top of it all. Which makes the biggest record of his late-seventies comeback a genuine oddity: he didn’t write it. In August…