KORD
This week we explore the instrumental tracks of Sheryl Crow’s 1993 chart-topping global smash “All I Wanna Do.” As always, you can hear the song and each of its stems here in KORD; sit back for a top-to-bottom analysis.
Read more about it..The session musicians who elevated ‘American Pie’
J. Geils Band turns the page and tops the charts with ‘Centerfold’
“Where such men love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love,” the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote in 1925 to illuminate what he famously dubbed the Madonna-whore complex — i.e., the dichotomy between the women a man finds admirable and those he finds sexually desirable, and the schism at the heart of the J. Geils Band’s lone number one hit, 1981’s “Centerfold.”
Read MoreDiana Ross flips her career ‘Upside Down’ — and returns to the top
“Upside Down” is both a new beginning and a last gasp. Its 1980 release signaled the arrival of a redesigned, thoroughly modernized Diana Ross — a sleeker, sexier Miss Ross than we’d ever heard before, but despite the record’s massive success, one we’d never hear again.
Read MoreGossip grinds Marvin Gaye to dust in ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’
When music critic Dave Marsh published his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made in 1989, he declared “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” the greatest single of them all — and as the years go by, the selection seems more and more unassailable. Marvin Gaye’s searing account of a man devastated to learn through the rumor mill of his lover’s infidelity “distills four hundred years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into three minutes and fifteen seconds of anguished soul-searching,” Marsh writes. “The proof’s as readily accessible as your next unexpected encounter on the radio with the fretful, self-absorbed vocal that makes the record a lost continent of music and emotion.”
Read MoreThe Wallflowers navigate a path to pop stardom with ‘One Headlight’
Say this much for Jakob Dylan: the guy’s got balls. It’s one thing to pursue a career in music, a profession with a 90 percent failure rate; it’s another thing when your father is Bob Dylan, whose musical career is the gold standard by which all others are judged. And it’s another thing altogether to bounce back from the failure of your first LP, but Dylan seized his second chance, assembling a new lineup of his roots-rock band, the Wallflowers, and writing the biggest song of his career, “One Headlight.”
Read MoreThe DNA of Blind Melon’s signature smash
Grand Funk’s ‘We’re an American Band’ brings the party to the people
“We’re an American Band” is rock’n’roll in its purest, uncut form. Big, loud and unapologetically primal, with the style and sophistication of a club-wielding caveman bludgeoning a sabertooth tiger, Grand Funk Railroad’s first number one single is an unabashed love letter to rock music as both lifestyle and lifeforce, a lurid yet lucid celebration of stardom in all its bacchanalian glory.
Read MoreHomer Simpson’s favorite band?
Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb reconnect for a classic
“Wichita Lineman” is an American masterpiece — a timeless portrait of prairie-gothic isolation and desperation. Recorded in May 1968 by country-pop crossover sensation Glen Campbell, songwriter Jimmy Webb’s ballad of everyman angst spins blue-collar pathos into a haunting meditation on existential desire, culminating in one of most profound expressions of love and longing in the annals of popular music.
