Chip Holland

There is a song that begins as a polite excuse and ends as a death sentence, and for nearly seven decades singers have been dressing it in their finest clothes and delivering it with immaculate composure. Cole Porter wrote “Miss Otis Regrets” in 1934 — reportedly improvising its first form at a party, as though … Read more

Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison wrote “That’ll Be the Day” in the summer of 1956, inspired by a John Wayne catchphrase from the film The Searchers. Wayne’s world-weary drawl — that’ll be the day — became the spine of something entirely different: a young man’s grin pointed straight at a lover who keeps threatening to … Read more

I have everything I need. Given that both the Smokey Robinson original and the Ronstadt cover are culturally significant — and the essay’s most interesting axis is the relationship between the two versions — I’ll use Format A: The Great Debate, though with Ronstadt’s version as the emotional center. >>> Scroll down for the video … Read more

By the summer of 1977, Linda Ronstadt was arguably the most commercially successful female rock singer in America. Simple Dreams, her eighth studio album, would displace Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours from the number-one spot on the Billboard chart — a record that had occupied that throne for an almost unfathomable twenty-nine consecutive weeks. Mick Jagger, who … Read more

Paul Anka wrote “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” for Buddy Holly, who recorded it in October 1958. The song was released in January 1959, less than a month before Holly was killed in a plane crash on February 3rd of that year, and climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 as a posthumous hit. … Read more

Lowell George wrote “Willin’” sometime before 1970, when he was still a young man in Los Angeles dreaming up the band that would become Little Feat. It was a trucker’s song, a CB-radio pastoral about hauling loads through Tucson to Truchas to Tocopah, sustained by the holy trinity of weed, whites, and wine. Little Feat … Read more

The year is 1993 and Linda Ronstadt is at a particular kind of creative peak — the kind that happens quietly, without fanfare, when an artist stops trying to be recognized and starts trying only to be honest. By the time she sat down to make the album that would bear this song’s name, she … Read more

Some songs arrive fully formed and still somehow feel unfinished. “Desperado” — written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey, recorded in London at Island Studios with musicians drawn from the London Philharmonic, and released in April 1973 as the title track of the Eagles’ second album — was like that. Henley had carried a fragment … Read more

By 1989, Linda Ronstadt had spent two decades shape-shifting through genres that would have broken lesser artists — country-rock, new wave, Broadway standards, mariachi — and surviving each turn not just intact but enlarged. Aaron Neville had been singing professionally since the early 1960s, carrying in his chest one of the most quietly devastating voices … Read more

There are songs that belong to their moment, and there are songs that keep escaping into new ones. “When Will I Be Loved” is the second kind. Phil Everly wrote it in 1960, and the Everly Brothers put it on the B-side of “When Will I Be Loved” — a song so confident in its … Read more