How Good It Is

Click here for a transcript of this show. It’s the holiday season, and that means that radio stations have moved a bunch of traditional songs into their rotations. Some of them have even gone All-Christmas-All-The-Time. But it seems as though some of these songs don’t stand up to closer scrutiny as Christmas songs. They’re set in the winter time, but they don’t appear to me...

John D Loudermilk wrote a song that's nearly devoid of actual facts. When it became a hit, a couple of interviews he did about that song turned out also to be mostly devoid of facts.

Neil Sedaka spent a bunch of time in the Top Ten, but this was his first trip to the Number One slot. And he took the song to the Top Ten again several years later with a vastly different arrangement.

Pink Floyd wasn't a band keen on releasing singles, since they viewed their albums as fully realized creations that needed to be taken as a whole. But a couple of tweaks to a song by an uncredited collaborator almost certainly was the impetus for turning it into a Number One hit worldwide.

The early-to-mid 1960s was a great time to be a folk singer, whether or not you were the protesting type. And Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie, had the decade pretty much fall into his lap. It didn’t hurt that he was actually kind of good at it.  And when, as a freewheeling 17-year-old, he and a friend took a fateful trip to the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts to visit a couple of frien...

Click here for a transcript of today’s show.  Shel Silverstein was a humorist, a poet, a cartoonist, and a musician who had a strong, if not especially obvious, influence on pop music through the late 1960s, up into the 1980s. Most people know him for his poetry books largely aimed at a children’s audience, but he also provided cartoons for Playboy Magazine, usually inserting a caricat...

The Isley Brothers' first charting hit from 1959 got its start not as a song, but as a bit they'd do to extend another song they were already singing in concert.

Ray Parker Jr wasn't the first person approached to come up with a pop song to support this film, but he was the last, and the best.

Lou Reed's signature song (he once joked that he knew his obituary would start with "doot, di-doot, di-doot...") has its origins in people he knew and worked with at Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory.

Click here to view a transcript of this show.  Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. They’re still stunning to look at.  The late 1960s was a great time for the fusion of folk and pop music, and a lot of singer-songwriters made their marks with recording their songs, and those of other performers, during that time. So it was when Judy Collins first heard Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now...

Benny Mardones may be the only person to be a one-hit wonder twice, charting two times with the same version of the same song.

This hit from early 1966 isn't quite the spontaneous fun party it sounds like.

The Billboard Hot 100 chart has been around for about 60 years. In all that time, only seven songs which weren’t recorded in English have made it to the Number One position. And there are several other foreign-language songs which enjoyed plenty of popularity without making it to the top spot, but the fact is, in United States it’s tough to score a hit if your song isn’t in Engli...

Alice Cooper's biggest hit was inspired by two things: Old movies and the last three minutes of the school day.

It's been a while since we took a look at a bunch of songs that you may not realize are covers of other artists' work.

Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018. This week's show takes a look back at the life and music career of the Queen of Soul.

Donovan struck lucky a couple of times with this song: first, it was the beginning of people looking into the deeper meaning behind absolutely every lyric. Second, the song got a weird boost from a practical joke being played by an underground newspaper out of Berkeley.

Disco was on its way out, to be replaced by Hip-Hop or New Wave, depending on the clubs you frequented. Blondie's last major hit in the US was a track that departed from their previous style and broke a few barriers along the way.

It was December of 1971 and Deep Purple was in Deep Trouble. They were all set to record their newest album, when the location they’d chosen for recording was accidentally set ablaze and burned completely to the ground. This is the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio. This picture is probably from the 1980s, given the computer screen over the mixing desk. The studio went through tw...

By nearly all accounts, the Supremes were starting to look like a failure. Between 1961 and 1963, they had recorded six singles, five of them for Motown, and none of them reached the Billboard Top 40 chart. There was a glimmer of light when the song “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” reached #23, but the act still wasn’t getting a lot of traction. It wasn’...

Gerry Rafferty was pretty much a known element to music fans as the voice behind Stealers Wheel and the song “Stuck In The Middle With You,” but by the time that song came out, Rafferty had quit the band, which had to shoot the promotional film (they weren’t quite called “videos” yet) without him. The guy lip-synching the vocals is Rafferty’s partner Joe Egan. S...

The song that cemented Eddie Cochran's place in the Rock and Roll firmament was written in about an hour by a 19 year old Cochran and his manager.

Murray Head is one of those guys whose name you may or may not know, but you’re certainly familiar with some of his work. In 1970 he worked on a concept album with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The first single from that album was written and recorded before the entire rest of the album, and it was released by the record company to gauge interest in the idea of an entire album built arou...

One of The Drifters' bigger hits might have been a sequel to one of their earlier songs, but it was definitely a prequel to one of their later songs.

In 1971, Don McLean was a known artist but hadn’t yet hit it big with “American Pie.” Lori Lieberman was a 19-year-old singer-songwriter who’d recently scored a contract. Lieberman attended one of McLean’s shows and she was so struck by his performance of the song “Empty Chairs” that she wrote a poem about it, more or less on the spot. She took the notes t...