Memory Lane Music

The sound comes before the song. Before any piano, before any voice, before any melody a listener could hum, there is a helicopter. It is not a musical effect in the usual sense, not a flourish added for atmosphere. It is a machine, low and insistent, its rotors beating the air in a rhythm that … Read more

The phone rings, and a woman answers it, and for a few seconds the whole future of American soul music hangs on an ordinary, everyday sound. She is not singing yet. She is talking, or rather, she is listening, and on the other end of the line is a voice so deep that it seems … Read more

It was late in 1994, and the radio sounded like it belonged to somebody else. The charts were full of voices that were younger, faster and sharper, singing about love in the language of the street and the club, and the old masters of soul were supposed to be history, fondly remembered, politely applauded and … Read more

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has followed Al Green’s career, when the story seems to stop making commercial sense. The singer who had defined smooth Memphis soul in the early 1970s, whose voice could turn a love song into something intimate and almost sacred, walked away from the pop charts at the … Read more

The tape is running, the band is already in the pocket, and the singer is doing something that would have been unthinkable on his first hit records. He is not building to a climax. He is not pleading for a lover to stay, or testifying about a love that has just arrived, or shaping every … Read more

It started, by the most reliable account, not with a melody and not with a lyric, but with a drumbeat in a room where a drummer was doing what drummers do when no one is telling them what to play. Bernard Purdie, already one of the most in-demand drummers in American music, was playing a … Read more

The tape was still running, in a sense, when the song was abandoned. That is the strange thing about the record that would become one of Aretha Franklin’s most quietly radical performances: it began as an unfinished sketch in a small Alabama studio, it was left behind when a session collapsed, and it was finished … Read more

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