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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 Aerosmith Made ‘Dream On’: The Teenage Sonnet That Waited Three Years
Every rock band has a song that defines them, but very few can say their defining song was written by a teenager who did not yet have a band, on a piano he did not own, in a summer lodge in New Hampshire — four years before the group existed. Fewer still can say the…
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How Bob Marley & The Wailers Made ‘No Woman, No Cry’: The Soup-Kitchen Song That Found Its Voice Live
Few of the most beloved recordings in popular music exist in two such different lives. No Woman, No Cry was first heard in 1974 as a short, curiously weightless studio track, its rhythm carried by a machine and its arrangement built around a hazy organ. A year later, in a London theatre, Bob Marley and…
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How Lynyrd Skynyrd Made ‘Free Bird’: A Girlfriend’s Question, a Roadie’s Piano, and the Nine-Minute Finale
Some songs are written in a flash of inspiration. Free Bird was assembled, piece by unlikely piece, over about two years — a chord progression its singer refused to touch, a first line borrowed from a guitarist’s girlfriend, a piano introduction composed by a roadie, and a guitar finale added for the most practical reason…
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How Paul McCartney Made ‘Live and Let Die’: The Bond Theme He Wrote in a Single Afternoon
In 1972, Paul McCartney was a man rebuilding a career in public. The Beatles were finished, Wings — the band he had built from scratch with his wife Linda — were still being treated by critics as a hobby rather than a band, and his most recent headlines owed as much to farm life in…
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How Roberta Flack Made ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’: The Song She Heard on an Airplane and Refused to Sing Twice
Some songs are about being understood so completely that it hurts. Killing Me Softly with His Song is one of them — and the eerie thing is that its own history keeps re-enacting its lyric. It began with a young singer in a Los Angeles club who felt a stranger on stage was singing her…
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How Janet Jackson Made ‘Rhythm Nation’: The Sly Stone Sample That Built a Nation on the Dance Floor
In the winter of 1989, Janet Jackson had a problem most pop stars would kill for. Her album Control had made her a superstar, and her label, A&M Records, wanted the obvious thing: Control again, bigger. Jackson wanted something else. Holed up with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at Flyte Tyme Studios in Minneapolis,…
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How Kenny Rogers Made ‘Lucille’: The Barroom Ballad His Own Mother Thought Was About Her
Kenny Rogers built a fifty-year career on knowing when to hold a story and when to let it break your heart, and it all started with a woman in a bar in Toledo who was not real. Lucille, released in January 1977, was the record that rescued him: his first major hit as a solo…
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How Billie Holiday Made ‘God Bless the Child’: The Song a Family Quarrel Taught Her
Most great songs are made in studios and songwriting sessions. God Bless the Child, the most famous song Billie Holiday ever helped to write, was made in a doorway, in the middle of a furious argument with her mother about money. Out of that single shouted sentence came a ballad that sounds less like a…
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How Blondie Made ‘Call Me’: The Stevie Nicks Rejection That Became the Biggest Song of 1980
The biggest American single of 1980 began as a job of work — and not even a job Blondie were first in line for. Call Me, the theme song to the film American Gigolo, spent six consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and finished the year as Billboard‘s number one single…