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How Gloria Gaynor Made ‘Honey Bee’: The Single She Bought Back From Her Own Label
Everybody knows how Gloria Gaynor’s story is supposed to start: with I Will Survive, the B-side that ate the world in 1979. But Gaynor’s recording career has a stranger, earlier first chapter — a record she made for one label, watched that label abandon, bought back, and sold to another label, all before most of…
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How George Michael Made ‘One More Try’: The Six-Minute Ballad He Wrote and Recorded in Eight Hours
George Michael was a perfectionist who could spend weeks worrying over a single sound, and the defining album of his solo career, Faith, was built that way — written, produced and largely played by Michael himself across months of sessions in London and Denmark. Yet the record’s most naked moment arrived almost by accident. One…
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How Glen Campbell Made ‘Galveston’: The B-Side Don Ho Gave Away That Became a Soldier’s Anthem
In the last week of February 1969, American radio was full of the war. The fighting in Vietnam led the news every night, and the pop charts carried the tension in coded forms — in protest records, in escapist ones, in the strange new seriousness of country music crossing over. Into that moment stepped Glen…
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How George Harrison Made ‘All Those Years Ago’: The Song Ringo Turned Down That Reunited the Beatles
The first record to reunite the surviving Beatles began as a song Ringo Starr did not want. In November 1980, George Harrison wrote and recorded All Those Years Ago for Starr to sing on his next album; Starr cut a vocal, decided the song sat too high for his voice, disliked the lyric, and gave…
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How Gladys Knight & the Pips Made ‘Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’: The Country Ballad That Became a Soul Standard
By the spring of 1974, Gladys Knight & the Pips were in the middle of the most glorious second act in soul music. Written off at Motown, reborn at Buddah Records, they had just topped every chart in America with Midnight Train to Georgia. The record that confirmed it was no fluke was not a…
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How Genesis Made ‘Turn It On Again’: The Solo-Album Leftovers That Became a Hit
Some hits are written. Turn It On Again was salvaged. The song that carried Genesis into the 1980s — their second British Top 10 single, the signature track of the album that first took them to No. 1 at home — was assembled from two pieces of music that Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford had…
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How Foreigner Made ‘Feels Like the First Time’: The Demo Song Every Label Turned Down
In March 1977, a band nobody had heard of released its first single, and within four months that single had climbed to No. 4 in America and announced one of the defining arena-rock acts of the next decade. Yet a year earlier, Feels Like the First Time had been the centrepiece of a demo tape…
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How Eurythmics Made ‘There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)’: The Stevie Wonder Session Behind Their Only UK Number One
Eurythmics built their reputation on ice: synthesisers, detachment, Annie Lennox’s cropped orange hair and androgynous stare. So the warmest, most joyful record of their career arrived as a kind of beautiful contradiction. There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart), released in the summer of 1985, is a gospel-tinged celebration that opens with Lennox…
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How Etta James Made ‘Something’s Got a Hold on Me’: The Gospel Shout That Dance Music Rediscovered Fifty Years Later
In 1962, Etta James was best known as a singer of other people’s heartbreak, wrapped in strings. Her signature record, At Last, had made her the voice of elegant longing, and her label, Chess Records, was content to keep her in ballads. Then, on a single drawn from her self-titled third album, she opened her…
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How Fleetwood Mac Made ‘Don’t Stop’: The Breakup Song a President Turned Into a Reunion
Rumours is famous as the album a band made while falling apart: two couples splitting, a drummer divorcing, everyone singing their grievances at each other through the glass of the control room. But its most buoyant song came from the member who refused to write a grievance at all. Christine McVie, whose eight-year marriage to…