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How Carly Simon Made Her Debut: The Story Behind “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”
In the spring of 1971, a twenty-seven-year-old woman with a stutter she had sung her way out of, a terror of the stage, and no particular plan to become a star released a debut album that opened with one of the bleakest hit singles of the decade. It was a song about marriage that made…
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James Taylor: The Family That Sang Him Home
James Taylor has always sung about family — the ache of it, the comfort of it, the people who hold you when the world won’t. But the family behind the songs is a saga worthy of its own album: a surgeon father and a singing mother who raised five musical children, a beloved older brother…
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How James Taylor Found His Second Wind on “JT”: The Album That Saved a Career
By 1976, James Taylor was in trouble — the quiet, respectable kind of trouble that ends careers without anyone noticing. The voice of a generation, the man who’d defined the singer-songwriter era with “Fire and Rain” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” had released three straight albums that landed with a shrug. The spark seemed gone.…
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Barbra Streisand: A Heart of Her Own
Barbra Streisand has always been the most guarded of superstars — the perfectionist who controlled every take, every camera angle, every note. But behind the control was a heart that kept breaking the rules: a marriage to a struggling young actor when she was Broadway’s brightest new star, a blind date she almost cancelled that…
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How Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb Made “Guilty”: When Two Worlds Collided
In 1980, Barbra Streisand did something nobody expected. At the height of her powers — an Oscar winner, a Broadway legend, the best-selling female singer of her generation — she picked up the phone and called the biggest pop producer on the planet: Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. She wanted him to produce her…
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John Denver: The Heart Behind the Highs
John Denver sang about love the way he sang about mountains — with total, unironic devotion. When he sang “Annie’s Song,” you believed every word, because he clearly did. But the man behind the gentle image lived a more complicated romantic life than his songs let on: a second marriage that burned bright and brief,…
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How John Denver Turned a Sailing Ship into “Calypso”: The B-Side That Became an Anthem
In the summer of 1975, John Denver was the biggest star in American music. He had the number one album, the number one single, the television specials, the sold-out arenas. And then, almost as an afterthought, he tucked a song onto the back of a 45 — a B-side, the side nobody was supposed to…
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Neil Diamond: The Heart He Gave Away
Neil Diamond has spent sixty years singing about love — the finding of it, the losing of it, the ache in between. But the most revealing love story in his life isn’t in any lyric. It’s in the marriages that shaped him, the children he raised across the chaos of fame, the city he comforted…
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How Neil Diamond and Rick Rubin Made “12 Songs”: The Comeback Nobody Saw Coming
By the early 2000s, Neil Diamond had become something nobody in 1972 would have predicted: a monument. The sequined shirts, the sold-out arenas, the singalongs — he was an institution, beloved and utterly taken for granted. Critics had long since stopped listening closely. The man who wrote “Solitary Man” and “I Am… I Said” was…
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Barry Manilow: The Heart He Saved for Last
For half a century, Barry Manilow has sung other people’s feelings back to them — the loneliness, the longing, the hope that love might still show up. But behind the sequined jackets and the soaring ballads, there was always a quieter story unfolding: a man who gave music to children he’d never meet, who loved…