Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue is often mentioned whenever some publication or website trots out an all-time best albums list of some sort. Mitchell might have hit upon the reason why it’s so popular when she spoke to Cameron Crowe for a Rolling Stone interview in 1979. “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” she said. “At [...]

The best songwriters can create genius from even the most routine situations. It seems that Jackson Browne didn’t have far to go from his residence to the studio where he was making his 1976 album The Pretender, so he rarely stopped to gas up his car. “I was always driving around with no gas,” Browne [...]

When Pink Floyd entered Abbey Road Studios during the first week of 1975 to begin work on their ninth album, the guys were exhausted. Their previous release, The Dark Side Of The Moon, had become one of the decade’s biggest hits, transforming the cult musicians into mainstream art rockers. Pink Floyd cemented their new audience [...]

Mac Davis has had a pretty productive and varied career in entertainment. He had great success as a crossover country artist, with #1 pop and country smash “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me” the most well-known of his many hits. He was a TV personality for a little while, hosting a variety show on NBC [...]

(Photo: Gino DePinto, AOL Music) “‘Gotta Be Wrong Sometimes’ is about this idea that we can, in fact, live parts of this life without a care,” says Marc Roberge, frontman of the wildly popular rock band O.A.R. “But I think it only works in small doses, with short bursts of recklessness. Most of our time [...]

“Someone Like You” Written by: Dan Wilson & Adele Adkins Recorded by: Adele Peak Chart Position: No. 1, Billboard Hot 100 When and where did you and Adele write “Someone Like You?” Dan Wilson: Adele and I met for the first time at our session at Harmony Studio in Hollywood, about a year and a [...]

(Songwriter Dave Barnes) “God Gave Me You” Written by: Dave Barnes Recorded by: Blake Shelton Peak Chart Position: No. 1 Billboard Country When and where did you write the song? I wrote the song at home in Nashville. I had the lyric idea on a visit to London, but to another melody. I’d had the [...]

(Photo: Christian group NewSong, with “The Christmas Shoes” co-writer Eddie Carswell, second from right.) It all started with a story that was circulating on the Internet in the 1990s, the story of a boy trying to buy a special pair of shoes for his dying mother for Christmas. The boy, whose meager savings wasn’t enough [...]

Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” isn’t just a song you listen to – it’s one you watch — a sonic piece of cinema the budding songwriter produced, wrote and directed to screen in the theater of your imagination. Hell, it even takes its name from a 1958 Arthur Ripley crime drama Thunder Road – a drive-in [...]

“Losing My Religion” – Written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe “That’s me in the corner. That’s me in the spotlight.” If you had the radio on in 1991, you probably bobbed your head to one of the most unlikely Top 40 singles of all time. In between spins of “Right [...]

Mavis Staples teams up with fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy for the traditional song.

Robert Plant introduces his Queen of Light character on the third song from Led Zeppelin’s epic IV.