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How the Bee Gees Made “Spirits Having Flown” — and Gave a #1 Hit to the World’s Children
In January 1979, the Bee Gees were the biggest band on earth. “Saturday Night Fever” had sold tens of millions of copies. They had three brothers, one falsetto, and the entire planet dancing. Every record company on earth would have advised them to do the obvious thing: make “Saturday Night Fever II,” cash the check,…
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Paul Simon: The Heart Behind the Hits
Paul Simon is pop’s most meticulous craftsman — the perfectionist who chased a placeholder syllable through “The Boxer,” who spliced South African township grooves into “Graceland,” who has won sixteen Grammys including three for Album of the Year. But behind the precision is a man of surprising warmth: a Queens kid who never left his…
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Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park: The Concert That Healed a City
On September 19, 1981, two men who had barely spoken in a decade walked onto a stage built to look like a New York rooftop, in front of the largest audience either of them had ever seen. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel hadn’t performed together in eleven years. Their partnership had ended in 1970 amid…
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Anita Baker: The Woman Who Owned Her Voice — and Her Masters
In March 2021, at sixty-three years old, Anita Baker did something almost no star of her stature had ever done: she asked her fans to stop listening to her music. Don’t stream it. Don’t buy it. Pretend, for a while, that the voice that defined quiet storm didn’t exist. It was the most radical move…
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“Compositions”: The Album Where Anita Baker Bet on Herself
By the summer of 1990, Anita Baker had nothing left to prove and everything to lose. “Rapture” had sold eight million copies. “Giving You the Best That I Got” had gone triple platinum, hit number one on both the pop and R&B album charts, and won her Grammys in two consecutive years — twice for…
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Luther Vandross: The Private Heart Behind the Velvet Voice
Luther Vandross sang about love with more conviction than any man of his generation, and he guarded his own heart with more ferocity than any star of his era. He never married. He rarely spoke about his private life. He deflected every personal question with a smile and a change of subject. But there was…
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The Song That Won Luther His First Grammy: The Making of “Here and Now”
By 1989, Luther Vandross had sold millions of records, stacked eleven platinum albums in a row, and sung his way into the permanent architecture of American romance. He had one of the most recognizable voices on earth. There was just one thing he didn’t have: a Grammy. He had been nominated eight times going back…
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Kenny Loggins: Still Alright — The Heart Behind the Hits
He has sold more than 25 million albums, won two Grammys and a Daytime Emmy, been nominated for an Oscar, a Tony, and a Golden Globe, and given the world the soundtracks to its biggest movie moments. But ask Kenny Loggins what his life has actually been about, and he will not start with “Footloose”…
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How Kenny Loggins Found His Solo Voice: The Making of “Celebrate Me Home”
In the spring of 1977, Kenny Loggins walked into a recording studio with everything to prove and almost nothing to lose. For five years he had been half of Loggins and Messina, one of the defining soft-rock duos of the early seventies, with seven albums and millions of records behind him. But when the partnership…
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The Doobie Brothers: The Heart Behind the Harmonies
They weren’t brothers. Nobody was named Doobie. The name was a stoned joke told over breakfast in San Jose. But for more than fifty years, the Doobie Brothers have been something rarer than a band: a brotherhood. Through illness and death, breakups and reunions, bankruptcies of the body and triumphs of the spirit, they kept…