Peter Gabriel | Sledgehammer The Taxi Was Waiting Peter Gabriel’s biggest hit was a last-minute jam recorded as the musicians were literally leaving the studio. It became his only #1, knocked Genesis off the top spot, and spawned the most awarded music video in history. Manu Katché had called a taxi. The French drummer was […]
The Last Song Recorded for So Made Peter Gabriel Read More »
Daft Punk | Get Lucky The Paradox A 15-second TV teaser became a 10-hour YouTube loop, and a song built to reject the internet broke Spotify’s all-time streaming record, the contradiction at the heart of “Get Lucky” never really resolved itself. Somewhere in early 2013, somebody took a 15-second television clip and looped it into
Daft Punk Built an Analog Temple. The Internet Worshipped It. Read More »
Tame Impala | The Less I Know The Better The Almost-Gift Kevin Parker tried to give his best song to Mark Ronson. Ronson sent it back, and it went on to outstream everything else Parker ever made. Kevin Parker spent days pacing a hallway somewhere in America, rehearsing a conversation he kept trying to talk
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Kanye West | Gold Digger The Hit He Never Wanted Kanye admitted he never liked Gold Digger, yet it became his biggest hit through a two-year pileup of accidents, rejections, and revisions that nobody could have planned. In 2013, Kanye West sat down with Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 and said something that should’ve
The Song Kanye Gave Away Twice and Rode to #1 Read More »
Taylor Swift | You Belong With Me A Phone Call, A Chorus, A Grenade A two-hour writing session produced a song that kicked off the most infamous moment in awards show history, a corporate war worth hundreds of millions, and a re-recording campaign that changed the music industry, and it’s still not done. Here’s a
The Song That Kept Exploding Read More »
John Lennon | Imagine The Song Everyone Knows Wrong “Imagine” is the most-played peace anthem in history, and John Lennon openly called it a sugar-coated Communist Manifesto. Nobody seemed to notice, or maybe nobody wanted to. The most-played peace anthem in human history is, by its own creator’s cheerful admission, “virtually the Communist Manifesto.” John
The Contradictions John Lennon Built Into “Imagine” Read More »
Stephen Sanchez | Until I Found You A Song Out of Time A song that sounds like 1958 has two billion streams in 2024. It’s not retro cosplay. Stephen Sanchez grew up digging through his grandfather’s discarded vinyl in a barn in San Jose, and the fifties got into his bones before he knew what
The Barn Full of Vinyl That Built a Billion Streams Read More »
Sabrina Carpenter | Coachella 2026 Feature Woman of Her Word Sabrina Carpenter closed her 2024 Coachella set with a promise to come back as headliner. Two years later, she’s topping Friday’s poster, at a festival that badly needed her. April 19, 2024. Weekend 2 at Coachella. The sun is dipping behind the Empire Polo Club
Sabrina Carpenter Promised Coachella She’d Be Back Read More »
Adele | Rolling in the Deep The Take You Can’t Redo The biggest song of 2011 uses a vocal from a three-hour demo session, one that Rick Rubin and a stacked band at Shangri-La Studios couldn’t beat, no matter how hard they tried. The biggest song of 2011, Grammy Record of the Year, Song of
The Demo That Beat Rick Rubin Read More »
Phil Collins | In the Air Tonight The Wait The most famous drum moment in pop history works because of three and a half minutes of near-silence before it, a song built entirely out of what’s missing. You already know what’s coming. That’s the whole point. Put on “In the Air Tonight” right now, the
The Sound of Nothing: How Absence Built a Classic Read More »
