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How George Michael Built “Faith”: The Album He Made Almost Entirely Alone
In the summer of 1986, George Michael did something that looked, from the outside, like career suicide. Wham!, the sunniest pop duo of the decade, had just played their farewell concert before 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium. Michael was twenty-three, rich beyond imagining, and adored on every continent. Any sensible manager would have told him…
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Eagles: The Heart Behind the Hits — Loss, Survival, and the Band That Wouldn’t Die
The Eagles sang about life in the fast lane, but they lived it — and paid for it, in ways the songs only hinted at. Behind the hundred million records and the sold-out stadiums lies one of rock’s most human stories: a founding genius gone too soon, a bassist who never recovered from the fame,…
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How the Eagles Created “Desperado”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
It was never released as a single. It stalled at number forty-one on the album chart. And yet “Desperado” — the title track of the Eagles’ 1973 concept album — became the song that defined the band for half a century, the closer at nearly every concert they ever played, and one of the most…
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Donna Summer: The Heart Behind the Hits — Faith, Family, and the Fight to Be Herself
The world knew Donna Summer as the Queen of Disco — the voice that moaned through “Love to Love You Baby,” the body on the “Bad Girls” album cover, the fantasy the industry sold by the million. But the woman behind the fantasy was someone else entirely: a devout church girl from Boston who became…
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How Donna Summer Created “Bad Girls”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
In 1977, Donna Summer’s secretary walked out of the Casablanca Records office onto Sunset Boulevard to run an errand — and was mistaken for a streetwalker by the Los Angeles police. That misunderstanding, absurd and a little dangerous, became one of the biggest disco anthems ever recorded. “Bad Girls” — five weeks at number one,…
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Dolly Parton: The Love of Her Life — Carl Dean and the Private Heart of a Public Legend
Dolly Parton sang about love for sixty years — “I Will Always Love You,” “Jolene,” “Islands in the Stream,” “Love Is Like a Butterfly” — but the greatest love story of her life was one she almost never talked about. For nearly fifty-nine years, she was married to Carl Thomas Dean, a man who never…
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How Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris Created “Trio”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
On January 19, 1986 — her fortieth birthday — Dolly Parton walked into a Los Angeles recording studio with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt and started singing, and American music has been harmonizing ever since. It had taken more than a decade to get there. Record labels had blocked them, managers had scoffed, schedules had…
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Diana Ross: The Mother Behind the Diva — Five Children, Two Marriages, One Unbreakable Bond
For sixty years, the world has watched Diana Ross command stages, survive storms, and embody glamour itself. But ask the people closest to her what she is proudest of, and the answer is never the records or the awards. It is the five children she raised mostly on her own, the family she held together…
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How Diana Ross Created “Theme From Mahogany”: The Story Behind the Ballad That Outshone the Movie
In the autumn of 1975, Diana Ross was the biggest Black female star in the world — and she was in trouble. Her second film, “Mahogany,” was a mess behind the scenes: its director had been fired, its budget was ballooning, and its star was carrying the entire production on her shoulders, even designing two…
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How Bruce Springsteen Made “Born to Run”: The Album That Was His Last Chance
In the spring of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was 25 years old, two albums deep, critically adored, commercially stalled — and out of chances. His label was losing money on him. His manager was fighting lawsuits that would soon paralyze his career. The rock press called him the future, but the future wasn’t selling records. So…