The Story Behind the Music
Stories
The stories behind the defining songs: what they mean, where they came from, and why they matter.
Wake Me Up
Avicii
Wake Me Up arrived in 2013 as something genuinely new: a dance record built on an acoustic guitar and a soulful vocal from Aloe Blacc, fusing house music with folk and country. Tim…
Read the storyHeartbeats
Jose Gonzalez
Heartbeats is not a Jose Gonzalez original. It was written and first recorded by the Swedish electronic duo The Knife as a pulsing synth-pop track. Gonzalez, a Gothenburg musician of…
Read the storyThe Winner Takes It All
ABBA
The Winner Takes It All is widely considered ABBA's masterpiece, and it is also one of pop's most quietly devastating songs. Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote the lyric in 1980, not long after his…
Read the storyOn Raglan Road
The Dubliners
"On Raglan Road" began life as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, one of Ireland's major twentieth-century writers. He wrote it about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he became infatuated…
Read the storyCalle Schewens vals
Evert Taube
Calle Schewens vals is one of the most cherished songs in the Swedish visa tradition, a waltz about a summer night in the Roslagen archipelago that has been sung at midsummer and beyond for…
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