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How James Taylor Made ‘Carolina in My Mind’: The Homesick Song He Had to Record Twice
Most anthems are written at home. Carolina in My Mind was written about as far from home as a homesick twenty-year-old could get. In the summer of 1968 James Taylor was in London, the first non-British artist signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records, recording his debut album in the same studio complex where the Beatles…
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How John Denver Made ‘Annie’s Song’: The Ten-Minute Chairlift Ride That Filled Up His Senses
Some love songs are assembled over months, in studios, by committees. Annie’s Song was composed in about ten and a half minutes, at altitude, by a man sitting alone on a chairlift with his heart pounding from a ski run. In January 1973, John Denver — twenty-nine years old, famous, and quietly repairing a marriage…
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How Jim Croce Made ‘Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues’: The Daydream He Dreamed Up a Telephone Pole
The hero of Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues is a man the world has completely failed to appreciate. Fresh out of a ninety-day jail sentence for non-support, he considers himself — in Jim Croce’s gleeful phrase — an undiscovered Howard Hughes, a genius plainly destined for a corner office, cigars and an air-conditioned life.…
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How James Brown Made ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’: One Take in Charlotte That Invented Funk
On the first day of February 1965, the hardest-working band in show business limped into a recording studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, somewhere between one show and the next. James Brown and his orchestra were in the middle of a road grind that would have flattened lesser men, and Brown had a new song he…
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How Janet Jackson Made ‘Escapade’: The Motown Cover That Became an Original
Escapade exists because Janet Jackson changed her mind about a cover version. In 1989 she was in Minneapolis with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, building the album that became Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and she had an idea she loved: she wanted to remake Nowhere to Run, the 1965 Martha and the Vandellas stormer…
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How Jackson Browne Made ‘Somebody’s Baby’: The Teen-Movie Favour That Became His Biggest Hit
Jackson Browne built his reputation on weight: songs about mortality, politics, lost love and the long American comedown of the 1970s, sung like diary entries he had barely survived. So the strangest line in his catalogue is also the simplest. The biggest hit of his career — the highest-charting single he ever released in the…
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How Helen Reddy Made ‘Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady’: The Airplane Napkin That Became Her Final Top 10 Hit
In the summer of 1975, Helen Reddy was about as famous as a singer could be. The Australian who had arrived in New York with a small child and almost no money now had three No. 1 singles behind her, a Grammy on the shelf, and a semi-regular host’s chair on The Midnight Special. I…
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How Heart Made ‘What About Love’: The Rejected Demo That Restarted Their Career
The most important Heart record of the 1980s began as somebody else’s reject. What About Love was written in a Toronto basement in about three hours, voted off the album it was written for by the band that recorded it first, and then shelved for three years. When it finally reached Ann and Nancy Wilson,…
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How Gordon Lightfoot Made ‘Early Morning Rain’: The Airport-Fence Song Other People Made Famous First
Gordon Lightfoot’s most famous song began as an image he could not shake: a young Canadian standing in the rain at the fence of Los Angeles International Airport, watching airliners climb into the grey, knowing he had no money for a ticket home. He carried the picture around for four years before it became Early…
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How Hall & Oates Made ‘I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)’: The Drum-Machine Groove Michael Jackson Borrowed
The band had gone home. It was one night in March 1981 at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York, and after a long day working on their tenth album, Private Eyes, Daryl Hall and John Oates were the last musicians left in the room, along with engineer and co-producer Neil Kernon and a…