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The Album Their Label Asked Them to Delay: How Porl Thompson Helped The Cure Make “Disintegration”
Photo: Moloch981 / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain It was a warm July night in 1989, and Wembley Arena in London was full to the roof. The house lights fell, and ten thousand people leaned toward the dark of the stage. Most bands in that position would have opened with the hit everyone came to hear.…
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Jean Seberg – 88 Years of a Pixie Cut, a Stare, and a Whole New Cinema
Jean Seberg in Paris, 1963. Photo: Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain The Girl Who Looked Straight Back On a Paris street in the spring of 1960, a young American woman in a striped shirt stood selling newspapers and looked straight into the camera. She did not smile for the lens, or soften herself,…
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Rod Stewart – Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright): The Story Behind the Song
THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG A Whisper That Filled the Room Put the record on, turn the lights low, and listen to the first few seconds. There is no crash of drums, no guitar riff announcing itself, no chorus rushing in to claim the room. Instead there is a voice, close to the microphone and…
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Kenton Scrapped It Twice Before He Kept It: How Chris Connor Turned “All About Ronnie” Into a Signature Song
Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain It was the spring of 1953, and Stan Kenton was preparing to record the same ballad for the third time. Twice already, his orchestra had cut the song in full, and twice Kenton had listened, shaken his head, and scrapped the results. Most bandleaders would simply have…
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The Conservatory Said No to His Hands: How Thomas Quasthoff Made “Winterreise” the Journey of a Lifetime
On an October evening in 2007, a hush settled over Wigmore Hall in London. The little hall on Wigmore Street is famous for one thing above all: song. That night there was no orchestra crowding its modest stage. There was no scenery, no costume, and no conductor to hide behind. There was a grand piano,…
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The Director Asked for an Opera: How Basil Poledouris Gave “Conan the Barbarian” the Voice of Ancient Gods
Photo: Kleseus / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 In late November 1981, a thirty-six-year-old composer raised his baton in a recording studio in Rome, Italy. In front of him sat ninety musicians drawn from Santa Cecilia and the RAI, with a twenty-four-voice choir behind them. He had three weeks to record almost two hours of music. The…
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Vic Chesnutt – 62 Years of Quiet Songs That Stood Tall
A Birthday That Is a Remembrance Today, November 12, 2026, Vic Chesnutt would have turned sixty-two. There will be no new album to mark the day, no tour dates announced, no birthday message from the man himself. Chesnutt died on Christmas Day 2009, in Athens, Georgia, at the age of forty-five. So this is not…
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One Sentence on the Telephone: How Rickie Lee Jones Turned a Friend’s Good News Into “Chuck E.’s in Love”
Photo: bagoum / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 The phone rang in a Los Angeles apartment in the fall of 1977. Rickie Lee Jones was in her early twenties, a bar singer with no record deal and no hit. The man who picked up the receiver was Tom Waits, her boyfriend and fellow songwriter. On…
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Remembering Ol’ Dirty Bastard: Nobody Sounded Like Him — Before or Since
Ol’ Dirty Bastard in 1994. Photo: MTV UK, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Voice That Arrived Like Weather Some voices enter a room. Others change the weather in it. In the autumn of 1993, when a nine-man crew from Staten Island and Brooklyn released a debut album that sounded as if it had…
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Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies’ Man: The Story Behind the Song
Leonard Cohen, 1988. Credit: Gorupdebesanez / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 In November 1977 — forty-nine years ago this month — Leonard Cohen released the strangest record of his career. Death of a Ladies’ Man, his fifth studio album, was produced and co-written by Phil Spector, the man who had invented the Wall of Sound,…