Memory Lane Music

Most career changes announce themselves. A singer quits a band, a band announces a split, a solo album arrives with a press release explaining the new direction. Lionel Richie’s change announced itself in a quieter way: in somebody else’s voice. In the autumn of 1980, while he was still, on paper, the Commodores’ singer, saxophonist … Read more

In late November 1987, one of the most successful singers in American pop music released an album that, by every commercial rule of the time, should not have worked. Linda Ronstadt was coming off a decade and a half of English-language hits, three albums of pop standards with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, and, earlier that same … Read more

On the evening of Friday, 5 April 1968, a concert became something it had never been intended to be. James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business, walked onto the stage of the Boston Garden, in front of an audience far smaller than the one that had bought tickets, and performed for more than two … Read more

By the time Jackson Browne released his first album in January 1972, he was already an old hand. He was twenty-three, and he had been writing songs professionally for more than five years. Other singers had recorded his work, a celebrated German chanteuse had sung three of his songs on her debut album, and he … Read more

In October 1992, the most successful British solo pop star of his generation walked into London’s High Court and asked a judge to declare his recording contract unenforceable. George Michael was not a struggling newcomer complaining about a first deal signed in ignorance. He was twenty-nine, rich, famous, advised by expensive lawyers, and bound to … Read more

There are breakups that arrive with a press release, a farewell tour, and a carefully worded statement about musical differences. The end of the first Eagles was not one of them. It arrived on a summer night in California, in front of a paying audience that included a United States senator, during a concert that … Read more

Everybody knows what Donna Summer became. The voice that could stretch a single phrase across an entire side of an album, the records that defined disco, the title that followed her for the rest of her life: Queen of Disco. What is less often told, and what makes the later fame stranger and more interesting, … Read more

There is a story about Dolly Parton that gets told at dinner parties, in trivia rounds, and in the introductions to concert programmes, and it is told because it sounds too neat to be true. In a single day, the story goes, Parton wrote two of the most famous songs of the twentieth century: one … Read more

Everybody knows the record that came out of this story: the bass line that walks in first, low and confident, before the voice arrives on top of it; the bright, strutting song about a romance turned upside down; and the fanfare announcing a second song about coming out, stepping forward, being seen. Those two songs … Read more

When Cyndi Lauper broke through in late 1983, she arrived sounding as if she had never doubted herself for a second. The voice was huge, funny, furious and tender in the same breath, and the image — the colours, the thrift-shop clothes, the Queens accent worn like a badge — looked like the invention of … Read more