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How Sade Made ‘The Sweetest Taboo’: Borrowed Thunder, Tapped Bottles, and a Quiet Storm
The first thing you hear on The Sweetest Taboo is weather. Rain falls, thunder rolls somewhere in the distance, and then — out of the storm — a groove assembles itself: a soft drum loop, a round bass line, percussion that seems to be made of raindrops, and Sade Adu’s voice arriving like the calm…
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How John Denver Made ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’: The Anthem for a State He Had Never Seen
It may be the most beloved state anthem in American music, a song so completely identified with West Virginia that the state itself eventually claimed it by law. Generations of listeners have sung its opening verse as if it were a memory — the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah River, a place that feels like…
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How Kiss Made ‘Detroit Rock City’: The Tribute That Became a Memorial
It opens with a death notice. Before a single guitar chord, Detroit Rock City gives you a radio newsreader reporting a fatal head-on collision, the sound of a man getting into his car, an engine turning over — and only then the most famous riff Kiss ever recorded. It is a strange, sombre way to…
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How Neil Young Made ‘Heart of Gold’: The Back Injury, the Nashville Weekend, and the Hit He Could Not Wait to Escape
It begins with a harmonica sighing over an acoustic guitar, and it sounds like it has existed forever — like a folk song Young found rather than wrote. When Heart of Gold reached No. 1 in the spring of 1972, it became the biggest single of Neil Young’s career, the signature song of the singer-songwriter…
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How Petula Clark Made ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’: Three Songs Stitched Into One Plea
By the spring of 1967, Petula Clark had nothing left to prove and somehow everything still to play for. She had been famous since childhood — a wartime BBC radio star before she was a teenager — and Downtown had made her, at thirty-one, the first British woman of the rock era to top the…
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How Carole King Made ‘It’s Too Late’: Twenty Minutes, a Legal Pad, and the Sound of Letting Go
Some breakup songs are screams. It’s Too Late is a door closing quietly — and that is precisely why it devastated a generation. Released in the spring of 1971, Carole King’s gentle, clear-eyed farewell to a dying love spent five weeks at No. 1, carried the album Tapestry into history, and won the Grammy Award…
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How Al Green Made ‘Let’s Stay Together’: The Fifteen-Minute Lyric and the Hundred-Hour Vocal
It is the most seductive three minutes in soul music, a record so intimate it sounds like a confidence whispered across a pillow. When Let’s Stay Together reached No. 1 in early 1972, it introduced the world to the Al Green we now take for granted: the sighing, falsetto-kissed minister of love, a singer who…
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How Bee Gees Made ‘Stayin’ Alive’: The Drum Loop That Defined Disco
It is the most famous walk in cinema: John Travolta, paint can in hand, strutting down a Brooklyn street to a beat that seems to rise out of the pavement. Yet Stayin’ Alive — the song that defined disco, resurrected the Bee Gees, and anchored the best-selling soundtrack of its era — was written in…
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How Billy Ocean Made ‘Caribbean Queen’: The Hit With Three Names
Every hit record has a story, but Caribbean Queen has something rarer: three stories, under three different titles, on three different continents. The song that made Billy Ocean an international star in 1984 first flopped in Britain as European Queen, then conquered America as Caribbean Queen, while a third version, African Queen, charted in South…
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How Bob Dylan Made ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’: The Death Scene Song That Became His Most Covered Song
The most famous death in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid contains almost no dialogue. Sheriff Colin Baker, gut-shot in a gunfight, staggers down to a riverbank at dusk with his wife beside him. He takes off his badge. He sits down by the water. And while the two of them watch the…