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How Paul McCartney Made ‘My Love’: The Solo Henry McCullough Talked His Way Into
Every great love song has a moment where the feeling escapes the plan, and on My Love you can hear the exact second it happens — a guitar solo that was never supposed to exist. Paul McCartney had written the solo himself, as he usually did. Moments before the take, his guitarist Henry McCullough leaned…
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How Phil Collins Made ‘Easy Lover’: The Twenty-Minute Jam That Became a Transatlantic Smash
It is the great accidental hit of Phil Collins’s 1980s. “Easy Lover” was never meant to be a Phil Collins record at all. Collins had been hired for one job: to produce Chinese Wall, the 1984 solo album by Philip Bailey, the falsetto voice of Earth, Wind & Fire. He was not the star, not…
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How Petula Clark Made ‘This Is My Song’: The Chaplin Song She Tried to Stop
The strangest number one of 1967 was written by a silent-film comedian who had been famous before its singer was born, intended for a singer who had been dead for sixteen years, and recorded by a star who disliked its lyrics so much that she tried to block its release. This Is My Song —…
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How Patti LaBelle Made ‘If Only You Knew’: The Shelved Ballad That Gave Her a Solo Number One
By the early 1980s Patti LaBelle had been famous for twenty years, and almost none of that fame was hers alone. She had fronted the Bluebelles as a teenager, reinvented herself in the glitter and feathers of Labelle, and sung the lead on Lady Marmalade, one of the biggest records of 1975. But the solo…
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How Paul Simon Made ‘Mother and Child Reunion’: The Kingston Session That Took Reggae to American Radio
Paul Simon’s solo career began with an act of geography. Simon & Garfunkel were finished, the partnership dissolved after Bridge over Troubled Water amid exhaustion and quarrels over everything from film roles to final mixes, and the question hanging over Simon was the one that hangs over every songwriter leaving a famous act: whether the…
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How Patsy Cline Made ‘She’s Got You’: The Song Hank Cochran Delivered to Her Door
Most of Patsy Cline’s great records were fought over. Producer Owen Bradley would bring her a polished pop-leaning ballad, Cline would push back in favour of something harder and more country, and the records that made her immortal — I Fall to Pieces, Crazy — often came out of that friction. She’s Got You is…
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How Pat Benatar Made ‘Invincible’: The Movie Theme That Became Her Final Top Ten Hit
Most artists get a final top ten hit by accident. Pat Benatar got hers from a film almost nobody went to see. In the summer of 1985, Invincible — written by Holly Knight and Simon Climie, produced by Mike Chapman, and recorded as the theme to The Legend of Billie Jean — climbed to number…
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How Otis Redding Made ‘These Arms of Mine’: The Driver Who Sang in the Session’s Last Minutes
Otis Redding got his break because somebody else’s audition failed and the clock had not run out. In 1962 the young Georgian travelled to Memphis as the driver and spare singer in guitarist Johnny Jenkins’s band, on a trip arranged so that Atlantic Records could hear Jenkins, not him. Jenkins played, the men from Stax…
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How Olivia Newton-John Made ‘Magic’: The Number One Hit From the Flop Everybody Laughed At
In the summer of 1980, American cinemas hosted one of the great mismatches in pop history. The film was Xanadu, a roller-disco fantasy that critics savaged and audiences mostly avoided — a flop so complete that its failure helped inspire the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards. The single pulled from that film, however, spent…
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How Neil Young Made ‘Cinnamon Girl’: Three Songs, One Fever, and a Duet With Danny Whitten
The most efficient writing session of Neil Young’s life happened when he could barely stand up. In early 1969, laid up at his home in Topanga Canyon with the flu and a high fever, Young wrote three songs in a single feverish spell: Down by the River, Cowgirl in the Sand and the two minutes…