When you hear songs like “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls” and judge the songs by their lyrical content, it’s easy to miss that Donna Summer is a well-trained mezzo-soprano with a three-octave vocal range. Her voice is a solid combination of smooth and growly. She’s got great tone ...
Goodrum had a unique approach that helped the process to completion. In conversation, he'd gotten a general idea of who Perry and Swafford were like as people – and he sensed a certain amount of tension in their relationship. So he focused on that as the song's main point, rather than...
Goodrum had a unique approach that helped the process to completion. In conversation, he'd gotten a general idea of who Perry and Swafford were like as people – and he sensed a certain amount of tension in their relationship. So he focused on that as the song's main point, rather than...
“In the beginning, I must tell you, some of the songwriting demons, when I sat by myself and started sketching ideas, I forgot that I had not gone into that place in a long time. And at first, it was a scary place to walk back into,” Perry says. “Like an old house you wer...
Lukather:Obviously, you have Steve Perry in the room and he sounds like a million bucks, you want more. You’re like, “C’mon, man, do a verse!” But you know, what’s so cool about Steve -- he said, “I don’t want to step on what you guys are doing. I love what you’...
But Perry's father left when he was seven. At Hanford's historicFox Theatre, he talked about how it's a loss he still feels today. "He used to sing to me. He used to sing to me, yeah, like when I was three or four years old he'd sing to me," Perry said. "And when the...
the duo sat on instrumentals for years — untilTivenran into Billy Gibbons at Trader Joe's. WhenTiventold the sharp-dressed man he was making a record with Steve Cropper, "He just lit up like a firecracker and said he'd like to bring us a song. I said, 'Well, it's...
"I’ve got a 6-year-old and an 11-year-old," MacCubbin said. "And now suddenly every time I talk to Steve on the phone, they’re like, ‘Did you just speak to Steve Perry? Oh, my God, are you gonna see him?’" Asked about potential future collaborations with MacCubbin and Mi...
My studio in Connecticut, in Westport, Connecticut, all the way out to the Hamptons. You also worked on Renaissance, and "Cuff It," specifically. What was it like to work on projects centered on radically different genres? It seems to me that there's a bit o...
Steve Cropper has stayed true to himself for over seven decades, thanks in no small part to advice from Stax founder Jim Stewart. "He said, 'Just play yourself and if they don't like it, they'll tell you,'" Cropper tells GRAMMY.com. "SoI've been playing myself all my life and it...